Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. That’s ancient history, particularly with these recent launches, as Google Cloud has become a real platform. This is vanil

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. That’s ancient history, particularly with these recent launches, as Google Cloud has become a real platform. This is vanilla node. You need not use Datastore, and can happily talk to a managed MySQL or Postgres instance via Cloud SQL (albeit sadly still via public IP and/or a proxy for now). The same is true of the recent Java 8 support, and will be true of all the new runtimes going forward (as mentioned downthread, the Google I/O talk is the best reference here). Google Cloud Functions is similar, fwiw. You can even package up arbitrary binaries and exec them (ffmpeg is a favorite, as is imagemagick’s convert).