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MANDY WAITE: This person's asking a question, What--
10 different definitions of a Frontend
versus a Backend Instance?
And they're still not really quite clear on what the
difference is between Frontends and Backends.
Is that something you can explain to everybody?
FRED SAURE: Yeah, so we actually--
you mentioned this in the introduction, sort of the two
different notions of a Backend.
You talked about mobile Backends for Cloud endpoints.
And then App Engine has a specific definition of what a
Frontend is and what a Backend is.
And frankly, other customers have said, that's confusing.
And we found it a little bit limiting in what developers
want to do with their applications.
And so if you've been actually reading through the release
notes, carefully, you'll notice that we've already
started talking about kind of a new way of classifying
components in an application called Servers.
And what we're going to do is we're going to get rid of the
two special cases.
The Frontends that do things one way and the Backends who
do things slightly differently, and we're just
going to say, you can have as many different types of
Servers as you want.
You can call them Frontends and Backends.
Maybe one of them is your mobile API, and one is your
admin API, and a third one is something experimental.
Maybe you have a component that's text message
processing, and another component that's like real
time interactive stuff, and a third one that's reports.
Every application is different.
But when you get beyond kind of a trivial application, you
often want to logically split your application into pieces.
You may want to deploy the different pieces separately,
like your mobile Backend that's handling all your
mobile requests, maybe have a new version for that.
And this will allow you to see separate traffic graphs for
each of your server versions.
Your logs will be separated out.
So your mobile Backend logs and your static image logs can
be separate.
So all of that's coming.
Just check out the release notes, you'll see that.
And just sort of forgive us for calling them
Frontends and Backends.
We'll make that go away.
You have an application, split it in logical pieces, and
we'll allow you to configure the different pieces the way
you want, whether you want different instance sizes,
different logs, et cetera.
MANDY WAITE: So things like, what a Frontend has currently,
autoscaling.
That will just be a property of a server instance?
FRED SAURE: Exactly, so you say, if I have a mobile
Backend how does scaling [INAUDIBLE]?
I have this batch Backend where I'm only going to do
certain administrative tasks, I actually only want one
instance of the server running, and it's just going
to be crawling some database or doing some background work.
And you can have variations in between.
So we're making it easier and we're simplifying the
terminology.