A six hour downtime is inexcusable, and shows they lack the resources to diagnose and restore the service in a timely manner. The level of communication of the problem is poor as well. Obviously they aren’t prepared to let people know they made a mistake since they aren’t divulging exactly what went wrong.

We have been kicking the tires on GAE, and with this outage and the way Google handled it is bad business. Right now, I don’t see any benefits to using the service. Amazon Web Services gives you the best flexibility with scaling up, down and out. Plus you aren’t limited to any single platform.

Lets be honest… Google is good at one thing… Selling Ads.

The lock-in problem with AppEngine seems like the biggest red flag.

Sonal Maheshwari USourceIT: Single source for all your IT needs

Have emailed google for a week without any responses.

First you have to get used to Appengine way of doing things in the hope that you will get unlimited scalability. That would add anthing between 30% to 50% additional development time. All is good if that provides you scalability. But scalability is iffy because you get penalized for every data write etc with “warning, operaiton would soon exceed its quota”. Bulk data load is a joke. So forget it if you have loads of data to be uploaded. There is no relational DB, so you one’s got to implement everything , right from count(*) et all.

There is little , if any documentation about what would happen when your app would be brought down. There is no support help line. Just post to google group and pray that it will get looked by some one at Google.

All in all, if you are startup, stick to traditional web hosts for development or even amazon. Scalability issues is a good problem to have, because it means your apps are being atleast used.

With Google appenine and its restriction , one would end up launching late and launching a substandard product.