I was looking into it a bit today, but was discouraged after hearing some comments about having to specialize on the application source level to accommodate the GAE environment, and that you have to use their proprietary non-relational database.

Are those things true, or as significant as they sound? (Not being able to directly port my source to another service sounds quite risky...)

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

That’s ancient history, particularly with these recent launches, as Google Cloud has become a real platform.

This is vanilla node. You need not use Datastore, and can happily talk to a managed MySQL or Postgres instance via Cloud SQL (albeit sadly still via public IP and/or a proxy for now). The same is true of the recent Java 8 support, and will be true of all the new runtimes going forward (as mentioned downthread, the Google I/O talk is the best reference here).

Google Cloud Functions is similar, fwiw. You can even package up arbitrary binaries and exec them (ffmpeg is a favorite, as is imagemagick’s convert).

Better than Heroku? I'm still thinking about GAE for my upcoming app API :-) Cheers

Gigalixir has been wooing me. I've been writing phoenix apps lately and Gigalixir include 10k rows of postgres for free, plus no sleeps and no daily restarts. Definitely worth looking at.

Founder of Gigalixir here in case you have any questions. Also, happy to give out free credits for the standard tier. Gigalixir also works with many languages other than Elixir.

What does it include?