This is exciting because the second generation standard environment allows Google App Engine to provide a more "idiomatic" experience.<p>Using gVisor, instead of NaCL, as the sandboxing technology, shipping new runtimes becomes a much more tractable task with less differences from the "plain" runtime. In fact, gVisor allows us to use the runtime unmodified.<p>This in turn, decreases the "lock-in". There are still decisions we need to make depending on the runtime, e.g. which package manager to use if there isn't a community default.<p>Hopefully, the narrative for "Serverless" moves beyond lambda and functions. Sometimes (!) we want apps, databases, caches and more to be "Serverless" :-)<p>Disclaimer: I work at Google, on the App Engine Runtimes team. I helped ship this