It seems as though you are actually contrasting two competing philosophies. Bare Bones with Add-ons : Heroku handles deployment (via git, releases), app server

It seems as though you are actually contrasting two competing philosophies. Bare Bones with Add-ons : Heroku handles deployment (via git, releases), app servers (thin), reverse proxies (varnish), and caches (varnish). (That's "bamboo" rather than "cedar" for what it's worth.) Heroku provides optional data storage via Postgres and background jobs via worker queues. For everything else, a combination of add-on providers (MongoHQ, RedisToGo, SimpleWorker, ...) and your own custom EC2/S3 code is used. Integrated : GAE handles deployment, app servers, reverse proxies and caches. It also has channels, XMPP, workers, a data store, and a blob store built in. All of the documentation is in one place and from one provider. All of the billing is unified. Personally, I have always assumed that the integrated approach is by necessity. GAE can't rely on other providers to provide functionality like a blob store because they don't want other providers running in their data centers. By contrast, since Heroku is in US-East, basically any SaaS can pop up to offer functionality with low latency to Heroku apps. If there's no SaaS, in the worst case, the web app author can write their own backend services within US-East to meet their own needs. I think you're right that the inconsistency of pricing, documentation, and quality of many providers can be a problem for the bare bones approach. However, I've found in general that almost everything I want is (a) S3, which has a simple API and a well known gem, (b) Redis, which has a simple API, a well known gem, and basically one (somewhat overpriced) provider, and (c) very rarely EC2 instances if I need to run some really weird, open source Java or backend code. I'm also much more comfortable knowing that there are basically no problems that cannot be solved, at some difficulty, by the EC2 backend solution. I could see the appeal of the integrated solution. For example, if I had a class of students, I could just point them to one documentation source with GAE, or monitor one billing page with GAE. Do you think that web developers generally prefer (a) integrated solutions with shared documentation and the possibility that some functionality may be impossible or (b) piecemeal solutions where they may get varying quality from a set of services they select, but where basically all functionality is possible?