Hehe, we're running GAE at work and I'm constantly looking for other options / trying to persuade management to spend the time on migration. I spend 8-12 hours a day fighting with GAE in one way or another, even though I very well might experience the "green is grasser" symptom.<p>Many things are nice with App Engine, outlined in the post. But so many things are not nice:<p>- For us the performance characteristics for some queries in the NDB (NoSQL datastore) have really left much to be wanted.<p>- The inability of calling C-libraries from Python code (except those provided by Google, they provide standard stuff like cPickle etc)<p>- The UI for logs / querying the database / admin is quite bad and buggy. Can't really use it in Safari at all (might very well be the wrong doing of Safari, but still)<p>- Limitations in how long functions / tasks can run. I've spent all of my Friday night tonight (I'm in CET) re-writing code for a batch-processing task that took just above the hard imposed limit of 10 minutes to run. According to the docs an exception is to be thrown when the task is nearing its limit but most of the time (intermittently…) the exception is not thrown and just kills the process…<p>- Limited community / toolset. Using GAE feels somewhat like using something really old or obscure, quite few SO questions/answers (the upside is that many of them are written by Gudio, which lead the NDB project before quitting from Google), and extremely limited third party tools / plugins for enhancing the developer experience. For example I haven't found any good way, except the GAE provided one, to do performance profiling.<p>- GAE has somewhat of a bad rep in some parts of the Python community I've found. A couple of Python libraries I've tried to use have not worked and then I've found bug reports where the maintainers have explicitly stated that GAE is not supported because of some limitation they have imposed. The biggest example I can come up with right now is probably Requests<p>With that said however, I feel like Google has started giving GAE more love recently. The documentation seems to improve, the dashboards/web UI:s have undergone major rework (not all of them improvements per se but still!). I actually said to my management a while ago that we need to move away from GAE in the medium term (1-2 years) because I feared that Google would start to "sunset" GAE. I wouldn't say that is the case today, but I could not go so far as to say that I would recommend GAE.<p>GAE is a very nice platform in many ways, but very limited. The tradeoffs for all the ease is quite high and should probably be considered very carefully before picked.