[hehheh]

Those aren't really alternatives to GAE IMO unless you would also say that a laptop is an alternative. A real GAE alternative would be a hosted solution that doesn't require you to install an OS or even know what OS it's using.

[scrollaway]

Such alternatives would have the same massive downsides as GAE (outdated software by design, lock-in by design).

I'm not saying "Don't use GAE because it's expensive/google/whatever". I'm saying "Don't use GAE or anything like it".

[NetStrikeForce]

I think both AWS and Azure have pretty strong PaaS services where you just deploy your [nodejs|python|php] app. Heroku also comes to mind...

[jacques_chester]

AWS has Elastic Beanstalk. Azure is still finding their own PaaS pathway.

Cloud Foundry gives you the "just push" experience for both of these (as well as vSphere, OpenStack, GCP and more to come). It's open source, with the IP owned by an independent foundation.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we donate the majority of engineering on Cloud Foundry.

[010a]

GKE/Kubernetes does fill that requirement; its not as simple as GAE, but its one step closer to bare metal.