[koolkao]

From teh pov of small teams, I think the most important difference is that GAE takes care of systems maintenance completely. No worries about having someone on call to fix the server, to monitor load, to periodically patch the server software. That is one less systems administrater needed, which can be a significant cost.

The problem with GAE as many have pointed out is being locked-in to the GAE architecture. I'm betting on open source systems built on top of AWS, specifically scalr. Can anyone comment on their experiences with scalr?