Unfortunately, that's not one of those over-engineering times. GAE standard environment simply does not include the needed SDK. I'm guessing they just haven't g

Unfortunately, that's not one of those over-engineering times. GAE standard environment simply does not include the needed SDK. I'm guessing they just haven't gotten to it. The SDK works as expected once imported as the outside library and various outbound requests things are configured and patched. I think I overstated the complexity. All I needed to do was enable SSL for outbound connections (one-liner in the yaml file) and add the requests library patch to use URLFetch service (python/GAE specific step). Searching SO and Google documentation is what took up 95% of the 3 hours I spent on this.