[codonaut]

They do have a history of that, but AppEngine has a huge footprint right now, and Google is only expanding it's cloud platform with Compute Engine, redoing UI, etc. They're clearly investing a lot here, I don't think they'll close this as easily as Google Checkout or others

[benatkin]

I thought Google Reader was too big to be shut down too. It had a small % of all users but a large % of power users.

[yeukhon]

Free services are not guarnateed to remain open. Paid services can continue to live for a long time until market share shrinks so low. GAE can't. It has a deep root in the market.

[ryan-allen]

I supposed, but would you risk your business by locking yourself in to their platform?

[zafirk]

Peter Magnusson from the App Engine team recently wrote about the lock-in argument: http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/25/google-app-engine-lock-in-...

[j_s]

I recently discovered this project as a replacement if you're using Java on App Engine:

http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf

[kodablah]

There is also https://github.com/AppScale/appscale