Cloud NDB Datastore library Beta

[Andrew Gorcester]

Hello Pythonistas,

I'm pleased to announce the Beta release of Cloud NDB, an updated version of the App Engine NDB client library for Datastore to support the GAE Python 3 runtime and other Python platforms. Our goal with Cloud NDB and related efforts is to ensure App Engine Python 2.7 applications are fully portable and can smoothly migrate to Python 3.

The library can be installed with `pip install google-cloud-ndb` and the source code can be found at https://github.com/googleapis/python-ndb. Please refer to our newly published migration guide at https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python3/migrating-to-cloud-ndb, and our API documentation at https://googleapis.dev/python/python-ndb/latest/index.html.

We're grateful to have received generous user support in testing, comments, bug reports and even code contributions in our Alpha phase, and we hope the community will continue to send feedback as we work towards GA. Please see our GitHub repository linked above to follow development and communicate with our team, or email me directly at gorc...@google.com.

While Cloud NDB can be used freely by any Cloud Datastore (and Firestore in Datastore mode) customers, it is intended to facilitate migration to Python 3 for App Engine NDB users; our recommendation for new apps is still to use the Cloud Client Datastore or Firestore libraries which are part of the Google Cloud SDK.

Thanks for your continued support of our platform. I am looking forward to hearing from the community on this and upcoming efforts.

[Kaan Soral]

Nice!

But with all these "freed" products, like App Engine Mail to forced 3rd party mail provider changes, I really don't understand how a migration path sends customers to a 3rd party cloud service :( (redis)

In essence, I think everyone used App Engine as it was an all-in-one perfect solution, each change extracts one piece out of the puzzle, in the end, App Engine is left just as an expensive auto-scaling instance service? (maybe not the best place to bring this up, but whenever I read docs, it's all I feel about)