[pekk]

You're right, though I wouldn't compare App Engine to things like Google Reader. When Google EOLs a highly-visible free service like Reader, it generates a lot of outrage, but consumers can find a replacement like Feedly at reasonably low cost.

The risk of writing apps on a platform like App Engine is far greater because people tend to spend years building software and a business tightly interwoven with the platform, only to be shut down by unpredictably massive rate hikes because you basically have to rewrite to get off the platform, not just the app itself but all your ops stuff too.

While it is possible to dig yourself into that hole using lots of Amazon services, Amazon doesn't require you to use platform-specific APIs, many of their services like EBS are very easy to replace, and Amazon's services have not been subjected to the same project-ending rate hikes. In practice, people move on and off EC2 all the time. So if you are going to trust a vendor, it's more reasonable to trust Amazon.

[teraflop]

This is Compute Engine, not App Engine.

App Engine has a very idiosyncratic API; GCE is more or less a direct clone of EC2.

[vgt]

Google AppEngine is just one part of Google Cloud. The discussion and article at hand are specifically about Google Compute Engine.