I don't have anything running on App Engine, in large part because Google is not a service provider I can trust. There's a really tough dichotomy between selling their magic scaling beans and the fact that anyone who needs said scaling beans also needs real support—something which is simply not in Google's DNA.
I'm surprised that Google isn't just selling a raw, white-box cloud-services layer (like AWS) that other companies can then resell with convenience and support on top.
AWS was grown out of Amazon's internal systems. They productized what they used everyday because they thought it would probably be useful to others.
Google doesn't offer anything like a virtual server internally. Everything is built on their various abstraction layers. They are productizing what they used everyday because they thought it would probably be useful to others.
Agreed. I work at a company in a similar space to App Engine, and we see this a lot: people are astounded that we reply to them quickly (often in minutes), on anything from "I can't find feature X" to "how do I do Y in SQL?"
It seems to me like support is a huge part of the value when you're selling a complex service like this to businesses.
