[bfwi]

How much of Google's cloud stack are you required to use to apply for this program? If they require you to use GAE for your backend for example, I think it's going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of startups.

[skj]

GCE is a more generic/flexible backend service. Run whatever you want on there.

[rlpb]

> Run whatever you want on there.

"Supported distros include Debian and CentOS."

Apparently not. This seems quite limited.

[icebraining]

"Include" is not "limited to": https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/operating-systems

[waitingkuo]

You can use GCE. If you embrace the cutting edge technique. You can try to deploy by docker. It seems deploying the docker image to Google is a good choice

[frik]

Good question! Is Polymer required? Would a different framework but with the new Google UX/UI design be fine too?

[rbanffy]

You can run your GAE workloads on AppScale on your own infrastructure (or on GCE, AWS or whatever IaaS you choose).

[bduerst]

GAE works really well for massive scaling without needing to worry about infrastructure, though it has some pretty weird limitations at times.

For everything that GAE can't do, we have a GCE instance running to handle it.

[rbanffy]

One thing I like about GAE is that it encourages good practices. Many people cut their high-scalability teeth on it.

[bduerst]

Right, but when you rely on other services that that haven't cut their teeth yet, it becomes a problem.

For example, if you're pulling 50 MB from an API that doesn't allow multi-part downloads, you can't do it with GAE because they have a 32 MB limit per connection.

[abritishguy]

You can use GCE which is essentially EC2.