I've had similar experiences with their auto-scaling. It used to be (looks like they've changed it[1]) to get the cheaper prices you had to use auto-scaling. The problem was that it would start a new instance to service one request, then keep it sitting idle for days. Of course, I was still getting charged per-hour for that idle instance.

I've also had instances on the Python side where I was using lxml, updated my site, and it stopped working because it couldn't find lxml. I followed their directions[2] and it still wouldn't work. I rolled back my code, still wouldn't work. Without a better log messages than, "Cannot find library", I was "forced" to move to Digital Ocean and run it all myself.

Finally, their Cloud Monitoring[3] falls down all the time. I realize it's beta, but I get an email about once-a-week because of a failure.

I'm a fan of Google in just about every other area, but they're really so far behind Amazon it's sad...

[1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/modules/#Java_I... [2] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/librari... [3] https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/