I have many years of experience with GAE, and still love it, the point is to use it where it fits. Agree about slow web console, especially for logs. Datastore

I have many years of experience with GAE, and still love it, the point is to use it where it fits. Agree about slow web console, especially for logs. Datastore viewer got better, though. I don't know about Python ecosystem, but I think that if you need C-libraries, then you shouldn't be running it in GAE. Low-level stuff sounds better fit for GCE, or AWS. Our team lives in Java world, and pretty much everything there plays fine with GAE. There are some low-level areas (like Unsafe memory management) where it doesn't -- but it's not web-serving part anyway, so it doesn't fit in GAE, IMHO. For example, we offload our recommendation regressions to Docker container engine. Recently they released so-called Flex environment which is basically container engine (Kubernetes) for any Docker container that listens on port 80. And they have several pre-build containers for different languages and with stubs for Standard environment, so you can throw-in your existing GAE app there. I didn't like Flex environment for my web serving part, though, for two reasons: 1. Too slow to deploy a new version, like 10 minutes. Really? It seems to upload all the files (Standard uploads only what's changed), and after that they spin up a GCE instance to build a Docker container from the files. And that takes time. 2. I now must care about serving static files myself. In current Standard environment, statics are automatically served by Google's servers, even if my app has no instances running. For Flex env they suggest to upload statics to GCS, but it's additional ops work.