For a system that serves up webpages and has a decent database back end, it works and works well. The overhead required to fit what you are serving to fit with

For a system that serves up webpages and has a decent database back end, it works and works well. The overhead required to fit what you are serving to fit within App Engine isn't major. With a lot of other systems you have a lot of infrastructure type issues that you have to deal with. What it costs on setting up App Engine, you save on configuring a different system. You are not going to get App Engine to do what you would normally use for a server and yes it is limited. App Engine appears to have ceased new development and is now moving toward managed VMs. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/ https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/ There are a lot of good and bad tools and technologies. App Engine is a great tool for some things but useless for others.