They handle scaling at only highest level, similar to spinning up more dynos/workers/webservers like I talk about in the intro. FLAME is about elastically scaling individual hot operations of your app code. App Engine and such are about scaling at the level of your entire app/container. Splitting your operations into containers then breaks the monolith into microservice pieces and introduces all the downsides I talk about in the post. Also, while it's your code/language, you still need to interface with the mount of proprietary offerings to actual accomplish your needs.