[ithkuil]

Appengine platform would definitely benefit from more written material about how to implement advanced scenarios.

The comment about bulk uploads/downloads is definitely a problem where GAE needs more work.

On the other hand, GAE forces you to write software that doesn't depend on long running instances, because real world servers do die. The limits about request sizes is also important because it helps guarantee upper bounds to latencies.

Sometimes it's appealing to just roll your own solution, and you might even get better results for when everything works smoothly, until you get stuck.

Of course, not everyone needs a system that is resilient to machine, power, network and datacenter, outages.

Just consider that once you need it, and you design your own solution to accomplish it, you might end up enforcing the same constraints on your application and probably won't get it right for the first couple of iterations.