Before I worked on App Engine I would have agreed with you that distributed transactions were fundamental. But it is hard to overstate how troublesome App Engi

Before I worked on App Engine I would have agreed with you that distributed transactions were fundamental. But it is hard to overstate how troublesome App Engine is to work with. I am grateful to Google for providing this service but it really requires you to start with a greatly lowered set of expectations. There are a wide range of severe bugs that make the service unusable for a significant number of people. By Google's own admission, the development environment does not reflect some basic errors the app encounters once deployed. <gobbledygook>For example, the "500 Server Error" issue makes it impossible for some people to deploy their app entirely or otherwise requires radical revisions because no logged errors are issued in development or production to explain a "typo or mis-configuration"</gobbledygook>. Until basic issues like these have been addressed, I would consider distributed transactions on App Engine to be, ironically, a luxury.