I'm looking at GAE as a AWS alternative too, so what follows is not complete, just a few observations. Here is the run down on the runtime services available i

I'm looking at GAE as a AWS alternative too, so what follows is not complete, just a few observations. Here is the run down on the runtime services available in the Java SDK (I think that it and Python are the most complete, not everything is available for Go last I checked): https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/apis https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/apis This is a good supplement: https://developers.google.com/appengine/tools_tips https://developers.google.com/appengine/tools_tips So queues and email are in, messaging might be served by Google Cloud Messaging or the recently announced Trello partnership. I don't think anything quite like CloudWatch or Route53 is available. I think of GAE as more like Heroku + add-ons than a straight AWS competitor so I wouldn't expect them to be entirely equivalent. On the other hand more control over the runtime lets them offer things that are entirely out of scope for AWS (channels). As far as updates, the blog shows the the SDK gets new features fairly frequently: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/ http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/