[sdaityari]

One thing that Azure and EC2 gives that Google App Engine does not is root access to VMs. Modifying my models with respect to the App Engine doesn't really seem like a good idea. Maybe I am too lazy to do that, but I just don't want to leave something that gives me a whole new machine on the cloud!

[Lewisham]

While you can't get root on App Engine, you can get root on a Google Compute Engine instance, and you can use Cloud SQL for a standard data backend. You don't have to use a keystore deal like the old days anymore (pre-2011).

Disclaimer: I'm a dev on Cloud SQL.