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In the past I built a few things on Google App Engine. Honestly one of my greatest regrets in life. I ported a few to PHP so I won't get screwed again when I need to change hosting provider. Still need to port some and am dreading doing it but it will be for the better.

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Huh. I deploy a lot of stuff to GAE and love it. But my approach is to just write regular Django apps, add a half dozen lines of GAE-specific stuff to the settings and that's it. No trouble at all running the same apps somewhere else with only trivial changes. That's worked really well for me for work where we're already on GCP and GAE lets us run our lower traffic services reliably for very little money.

I was using Datastore and other GAE specific stuff.

It's a shame companies, especially large ones with strategic architecture teams who should know better, haven't identified the short term cost savings of using cloud provider specific services is not worth the long term cost of vendor lock in.

And for startups their recently minted MBA CEOs are too willing to load up on "tech debt" on the race to revenue.

And really, it's not a bad trade - financially. But it will frustrate your eng team, for a bit - especially if you don't actually get the revenue stream going.

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