I’m just starting a GAE app for the first time ever and I chose what you call “old school”, but they call “standard” because my understanding is that it’s more cost effective in that when you have no traffic, you have little to no costs.

Also, standard has start up time of like a second vs minutes for the “flexible” version. Basically standard, with Python 2.7 is a true app engine, where flexible is just a container service which runs almost whatever you want.

People really shouldn’t try to position flexible as a new version of GAE. It’s a totally different service. If everyone who’s currently using standard had to switch to flexible, Many if their bills would go up. Is Google EOLing standard?

I was using GAE Standard with Python on my last gig for a couple of years, and now I'm using GAE Flexible, and I totally agree with you.

My guess have always been that the naming choice was an attempt at rescuing the somewhat bad PR they had with GAE Standard by "polluting" (improving) the GAE brand with this new thing.

(I was seriously concerned when I was told during the interview that they were using GAE on this job, but reliefed when it turned out to be GAE Flexible. However, I do miss some of the magic provided by Standard, but do not miss Python 2.7 and some of the restrictions.)

Yeah I'm still using the "standard" GAE, because it's simpler and still has better features -- but old Python :-(. I'm hoping they will eventually upgrade it, but I don't work there, so who knows?