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Historically, the App Engine standard environment provided several scalable, proprietary services
for app development. These services were bundled with
[first-generation runtimes](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/runtimes)
(also called App Engine *legacy runtimes*), which include
Python 2, Java 8, Go 1.11, and PHP 5.5. Because several
of the legacy runtimes are no longer maintained by their respective
open-source communities, as an App Engine developer, you may face hard choices
on whether to invest time and effort in migrating to a newer runtime or else
incur growing costs to retain your app on a legacy runtime.

Recognizing this challenge, Google Cloud is committed to providing you with a
more incremental migration path to newer runtimes. To reduce runtime migration
complexity, Google Cloud now supports a set of App Engine legacy bundled services and
their associated APIs on second-generation runtimes, which include
[Python 3](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python3/runtime),
[Java 11+](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java-gen2/runtime),
[Go 1.12+](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go/runtime), and
[PHP 7+](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/php-gen2/runtime). Your app
can call legacy bundled services APIs for second-generation runtimes through
language-idiomatic libraries.
![Accessing App Engine bundled services in first- and second generation runtimes](https://docs.cloud.google.com/static/appengine/docs/images/bundled-services.svg) **Figure 1.** How apps access the App Engine legacy bundled services

In runtime migration scenarios, you often also have the option to use
Google Cloud products that offer similar functionality as the
legacy bundled services. For the legacy bundled services that are not available as
separate products in Google Cloud, such as image processing, search, and
messaging, you can use third-party providers or other workarounds as suggested
in the Runtimes guide.

To learn more about these options for migrating your app, see
[Migrate off of legacy bundled services](https://docs.cloud.google.com/appengine/migration-center/standard/services/migrating-services).