I _think_ people were also annoyed by the GAE pricing change mess.
Also, amazon is known for good support, google is known for horrible support.
Also, amazon is known for good support, google is known for horrible support.
On the whole, I think the only thing they could improve would be to reduce the siloing between different offerings. When dealing with an issue that spans, say, EC2 and Route 53, I would expect their support to talk to each other and present a unified response to the customer rather than require us to deal with two separate support reps. But this type of siloing goes beyond support and applies equally to the AWS product.
Having said that, we pay for their 500$/mo support offering and the responses are pretty good. We're also split between AZ's etc as recommended.
I use GAE for http://recent.io/ (which I left CBS last year to found), and have found that prices have been gradually falling for the last few years. I can't speak to what happened in 2011, but I think it's fair to say that GAE was a much less mature product then.
My own sense is that Google would like to diversify away from being 90%+ reliant on advertising, and is highly unlikely to discontinue a paid service that serves that goal, that is profitable, that is under active development, that allows it to compete with Amazon, and that is used for its own products internally. You might as well speculate they'd discontinue search or email.
I use AWS for some smaller components of http://recent.io/, and have found both to be equally reliable. Google also has assigned me a rep who I can call or email when there's a billing issue, sign up for beta trials of new features I'd like to test, address technical problems, etc., and I've never heard from a human at Amazon.
If were really worried about costs, you'd convert your App Engine app to Go.
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/g...