It's been mostly driven as a research project and because GAE is so cheap to use (thus far) there hasn't been much of an incentive for people to use it as an al

It's been mostly driven as a research project and because GAE is so cheap to use (thus far) there hasn't been much of an incentive for people to use it as an alternative. There has been a good amount of usage within the research community though. We're looking at making AppScale more than just an alternative; something along the lines of a hybrid setup where data is replicated to your own cluster for fault tolerance and data analytics.