[acdha]

App Engine seems to me like the classic Google product: some cool ideas but the initial experience was clunky and the pricing model scared people, especially since you were locking yourself into a proprietary architecture. Google engineers could point to various things it did to help with future scaling needs and took the advantages of things like the NoSQL data model for granted but everyone I knew who didn't work for Google was generally asking questions like “How long would it take to migrate if they cancel the service?” or “What's my coping strategy if they have another major outage?”.

I think a little time invested on customer service and user experience would have gone a long way.

[iainmerrick]

I just realised there was another problem: no internal customers. If there had been an important team inside Google keen on using App Engine, that might have helped them figure out the right feature set. But instead they were just guessing at what users outside Google might want. (Compare to Gmail, which was and is very heavily used inside Google.)

[crb]

Thousands of internal Google apps (most of the important ones we use day-to-day) run on App Engine. Many external apps do too - https://plus.google.com/107043289104010976501/posts/VYybt1BC... talks about developers.google.com, for example.

That doesn't help though, as Googlers learn to write apps the Google way (massively horizontally scalable, managed NoSQL data service), which looks very much like App Engine. Outside, people still wanted to run their relational databases and large VMs, and App Engine didn't let them do that. That's why we came out with Compute Engine.