I started building my company back in the hey-day of PaaS, when Heroku, Google App Engine, and to a lesser degree Amazon Elastic Beanstalk were all the rage. W

I started building my company back in the hey-day of PaaS, when Heroku, Google App Engine, and to a lesser degree Amazon Elastic Beanstalk were all the rage. When starting from nothing, these were incredible platforms. Features like the OS, web server, memcache, taskqueues, databases, startup-scripts, emailing, and auto-scaling were all built-in with almost no configuration. The PaaS wave has pretty much come and gone. Now you need to think about and choose your linux image. If you want memcache, setup your own Redis server. For taskqueues, you need to master RabbitMQ. For email, sign up for Sendgrid or another service. App Engine still exists, but they keep stripping features from it, and push you to standalone services. When you get very large, you'll likely need to migrate to these more tunable services eventually, but when you're just starting out, it's a huge boost in productivity to have these basic services available that just work for a large majority of use-cases. My guess is that most of the PaaS users were smaller companies / solos that didn't have the bandwidth to manage all these services and also build their app, and I suspect many operated in the free tier. Google probably recognized they weren't making money in the space, and shifted gears to focus on larger companies that required far more complex setups, and generated far more in fees. It's a shame there has been such a strong movement away from PaaS, it was far easier in the past to get a fully functioning platform up and running than it is today.