[teich]

PM on the team. Flex allows bigger instance sizes, VPC access, custom base docker images with custom binaries. Generally, it's a bit more flexible. :)

[frew]

Does this runtime have access to the Standard APIs? It doesn't seem like the docs have any mention of Task Queue/Memcache/etc.

[sudhirj]

The other standard runtimes have special packages, but I think for Node everything is just being lumped into the companion package https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/docs/reference/libraries

[thefounder]

No. The real issue is that these APIs/platforms are closed source. Sooner or later you may need to move a service from appengine to a non-gae environment and you will find that nothing works. If you invest in tools/libs (i.e wrappers/ORM around the GAE APIs) the loss is even bigger.

[friedman23]

Thanks for the response! You all are doing some good work.