Amazon might be known for good support on the customer business, but I've not heard the same regarding AWS -- quite the opposite. If Google support were worse, it would have to just ignore you.
It think it varies based on your account. We were one of the companies that presented during the keynote at this year's re:Invent. We've also got an enterprise account. I'm not sure if either of these are a determining factor, but we get excellent support. Phone support is good and emails are answered in about an hour. They've also connected us with their engineers when support isn't able to resolve things.
On the whole, I think the only thing they could improve would be to reduce the siloing between different offerings. When dealing with an issue that spans, say, EC2 and Route 53, I would expect their support to talk to each other and present a unified response to the customer rather than require us to deal with two separate support reps. But this type of siloing goes beyond support and applies equally to the AWS product.
Yes the fact that you were inside the loop enough to be part of the presentation side of re:Invent means your experience is abnormal. You've got the right contacts and profile for them to brag about you.
Having said that, we pay for their 500$/mo support offering and the responses are pretty good. We're also split between AZ's etc as recommended.
As <pm> points out nearby, the GAE pricing issue was in 2011. It's now 2015.
I use GAE for http://recent.io/ (which I left CBS last year to found), and have found that prices have been gradually falling for the last few years. I can't speak to what happened in 2011, but I think it's fair to say that GAE was a much less mature product then.
My own sense is that Google would like to diversify away from being 90%+ reliant on advertising, and is highly unlikely to discontinue a paid service that serves that goal, that is profitable, that is under active development, that allows it to compete with Amazon, and that is used for its own products internally. You might as well speculate they'd discontinue search or email.
I use AWS for some smaller components of http://recent.io/, and have found both to be equally reliable. Google also has assigned me a rep who I can call or email when there's a billing issue, sign up for beta trials of new features I'd like to test, address technical problems, etc., and I've never heard from a human at Amazon.
Yes that was 2011 but it scared the hell out of me. Since then all my company's project are hosted on Heroku and other Amazon technologies (Simpledb, Dynamo etc.). If I had to have a vendor lock in in exchange of faster development process, I'd prefer to get locked in with Amazon other than Google after that GAE pricing incident.
It wasn't easy to mitigate: re-writes were needed because of the private apis. We ended up doing a lot of optimization to prevent a pet project from costing us too much money, which before the price increase stayed well under the charging threshold. The pricing incident was the only thing on my mind about Google's cloud because we left Google since then. I'm sure things are different now, but then I got too many other things to do before taking a serious look at ditching aws for google.
Seeing as I can't reply to the comment in question... the price hike article you mention is in 2011. The price hike was a change of system, and everything went up because most people were using Python 2.5 which had no threading support. Python 2.7 had proper threading support, and unsurprisingly when that was enabled, everyone's cost dropped by three-quarters. Google dropped support for 2.5 two years ago.
If were really worried about costs, you'd convert your App Engine app to Go.