The bigger complaint I've got with App Engine, which I don't have with this, is that it's complete lock-in.
If I write my app against Heroku, I can pick up and move to AWS, Rackspace, Azure, or even a local cloud such as vSphere, VMware Fusion, or Hyper-V, quite easily. That's because the PostgreSQL/Unicorn/Redis/whatever that's on Heroku is the same as what I can run on any of those other services. Even if I use Microsoft's technologies, it's generally not that hard to move form a pure Windows stack to a Mono/PostgreSQL one these days.
That's not true for App Engine. Their database engine exists nowhere else. Their general web stack exists nowhere else. Yes, I know about Appscale, but it hasn't been updated in forever, and empirically, I don't think that HBase's performance is a real replacement for Google's data storage. As a result, if Google radically alters their pricing--as they've done before--then you just have to shut up and take it.
I don't want that kind of lock-in, no matter how awesome the product is.
If I write my app against Heroku, I can pick up and move to AWS, Rackspace, Azure, or even a local cloud such as vSphere, VMware Fusion, or Hyper-V, quite easily. That's because the PostgreSQL/Unicorn/Redis/whatever that's on Heroku is the same as what I can run on any of those other services. Even if I use Microsoft's technologies, it's generally not that hard to move form a pure Windows stack to a Mono/PostgreSQL one these days.
That's not true for App Engine. Their database engine exists nowhere else. Their general web stack exists nowhere else. Yes, I know about Appscale, but it hasn't been updated in forever, and empirically, I don't think that HBase's performance is a real replacement for Google's data storage. As a result, if Google radically alters their pricing--as they've done before--then you just have to shut up and take it.
I don't want that kind of lock-in, no matter how awesome the product is.