App Engine Flex python Cloud Build builder pip version 10.0.1 doesn't see and thus won't install tensorflow 2.1

[Jason Brancazio]

We need to import Tensorflow 2.1 into an App Engine Flask app to do some data wrangling prior to sending requests for inference to Cloud AI Platform. Unfortunately we get this error when trying to build:

Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement tensorflow==2.1.0 (from -r requirements.txt (line 16)) (from versions: 1.13.0rc1, 1.13.0rc2, 1.13.1, 1.13.2, 1.14.0rc0, 1.14.0rc1, 1.14.0, 2.0.0a0, 2.0.0b0, 2.0.0b1)

The pip in App Engine Flex images was updated to v20 today, but I don't believe pip was updated in the Docker container used by Cloud Build to handle App Engine deployment.  I believe this is the path to that builder: gcr.io/cloud-builders/docker@sha256:461bb53c226048a2f5eabebe1d8b4367a02d3a484a8cc7455a21377702bbf4f6

I suspect the ultimate cause of the error is that Tensorflow stopped publishing manylinux1 wheels after the 2.0.0.b1 release. Regardless, App Engine / Cloud Build should use a recent version of pip when building images.

[yananc]

Hello Jason,

Thank you for reporting this to us.

I was able to reproduce the issue with a test deployment with TensorFlow 2.1.0. This might be affected by a known issue for App Engine / Cloud Functions. A similar issue was also reported and could be found here [1], though it happened to Cloud Functions. Our Engineering team has been aware of it. Please follow the link [1] for any updates on the issue. 

Hope it helps.

[1]: https://issuetracker.google.com/151074055