> App Engine is a joke. It was an interesting and novel idea at the time but it is not something you want to pick up today [...] in a world where there's so many better, cheaper, non-lock-in alternatives, even within Google itself.
As I see it, at the time App Engine was introduced, there were a lot more comparable PaaS offerings (maybe not with the same languages support, but the style of PaaS that GAE is was more common.) Competition from GAE and Heroku (which originally was focused on a similar PaaS offering) seems to have driven most of the other alternatives to pivot to something else or fail entirely.
Right now, there's very few close substitutes; there's lots of "alternatives" that require more infrastructure work (e.g., IaaS and similar offerings like GCE, GKE, EC2, etc.) or are off in the other direction ("severless" function hosting like Lambda or GCF.) And in some cases these might be better options than an GAE-style PaaS, but they aren't really direct substitutes, and they leave a space better served by GAE.
As I see it, at the time App Engine was introduced, there were a lot more comparable PaaS offerings (maybe not with the same languages support, but the style of PaaS that GAE is was more common.) Competition from GAE and Heroku (which originally was focused on a similar PaaS offering) seems to have driven most of the other alternatives to pivot to something else or fail entirely.
Right now, there's very few close substitutes; there's lots of "alternatives" that require more infrastructure work (e.g., IaaS and similar offerings like GCE, GKE, EC2, etc.) or are off in the other direction ("severless" function hosting like Lambda or GCF.) And in some cases these might be better options than an GAE-style PaaS, but they aren't really direct substitutes, and they leave a space better served by GAE.