[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.