This was largely solved in 1.3.1. I quote: Reduced error rate with Automatic Datastore Retries - We've heard a lot of feedback that you don't want to deal wit

This was largely solved in 1.3.1. I quote: Reduced error rate with Automatic Datastore Retries - We've heard a lot of feedback that you don't want to deal with the Datastore's sporadic errors. In response, App Engine now automatically retries all datastore calls (with the exception of transaction commits) when your applications encounters a datastore error caused by being unable to reach Bigtable. Datastore retries automatically builds in what many of you have been doing in your code already, and our tests have shown it drastically reduces the number of errors your application experiences (by up to 3-4x error reduction for puts, 10-30x for gets).