> IMHO, no informed person would ever pick proprietary, lock-in-heavy PAAS solutions.

This sounds like your personal bias and is clearly not true. Business doesn't work like this and you would be surprised if you looked at just how much proprietary software runs the world.

Lock-in isn't a thing to fear, it's a natural spectrum of using any service. The more specialized that service, the more work will be involved if you need to move away.

The real question is if the risk is worth it. Do you really need to switch? Are you worried that Google or AWS will somehow disappear before your business does? If not, what is the big deal?

I did preface with "IMHO" (in my humble opinion). I'll give you it's not very humble, but it's an opinion.

You're conflating two things though: Lock-in as a whole, and unnecessary lock-in like GAE's. Yes, lock-in is a choice to make and not always an incorrect one. But I can safely say no informed business should/would pick Adobe Flash over HTML today for, say, internal web apps. Adobe Flash is fairly old and legacy technology, deprecated in all but name for that scenario and includes a fairly significant amount of lock in due to its proprietary nature requiring you to rework your entire application were you to change to an alternatire. Sounds familiar?

There is no such thing as "unnecessary" lock-in, it's just how the service is. Take it or leave it. Just because you think it's unnecessary doesn't change how that service is offered. And so what if there is work to do? Again, that is what "lock-in" is by definition = the work involved to move away.

You weigh the risks and see if the potential work (that might not ever need to be done) is worth the benefits offered today by that service. That's what an informed business does.

But picking at that a bit, if I were to run a simple off-the-shelf Django setup against MySQL, I'd use GAE (if not Standard than certainly Flexible). My code wouldn't be any different than deploying it to a raw VM, so I'm not locked in and could deploy it on DO, AWS or anywhere else in a heartbeat. In the meantime, I don't have to deal with setting up load balancing, autoscaling, DNS per module, etc. so I get some real value from that.

Is your concern the lock-in from the code standpoint, or operational "lock-in" that once you've got all this set up for you, you'd have to go replicate it to get out? If the latter, aren't you saying you're going to do that on Day 1 in the "avoid PaaS" case?

Why would you use GAE in this scenario, over, say, GCE or even AWS? And at a smaller scale, DO would be far cheaper.