Curious as to when you last tried out GAE. I've had a wonderful experience so far over the last 2 years. My instances never take longer than a few seconds to st

Curious as to when you last tried out GAE. I've had a wonderful experience so far over the last 2 years. My instances never take longer than a few seconds to start up... in fact it's sometimes spooky how fast they do. "...with very harsh restrictions and poor portability" You can say the same about web development, but the real question is if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. As a one-man-band GAE is almost a necessity for me, allowing me to focus purely on code. As far as portability, I'm religious about wrapping any GAE-specific code/paradigms so I can hop onto EC2 or whatever pretty easily if I need to (actually did need to once). Certainly if I was leading a large team, we would explore more efficient and cost-effective options, but for me it's perfect. There is also Google Compute Engine, which may mitigate the restrictions of GAE...haven't tried it myself yet though.