The new Managed VMs feature in Google App Engine lets you deploy anything - including complete runtimes [1] - and you can do this with git. There's even a test pipeline where it won't get deployed unless your unit tests pass.

App Engine works at lightning speed (lets see Heroku turn up new instances of your app in O(ms)) because it's opinionated. You can trade performance for opinion - on the left end you have Google managing everything (App Engine), and on the other you have full flexibility (Compute Engine). Managed VMs, and other new features like Replica Pools and Deployment Manager [2], allow you to move toward a middle ground, where you can have Google do the automation of more flexible primitives (full VMs).

And you can absolutely migrate your technology to your own servers. AppScale [3] have an open source implementation of App Engine you can run yourself, and there's nothing stopping you use other open source databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc, on Compute Engine, and talking to those from your App Engine app.

It sounds like you've not looked at Google Cloud Platform for a while. Take a deeper look, you might be impressed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3B1BhyXXdc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZdoL5d7KC8 [3] https://github.com/AppScale/appscale/wiki

And pray that in 3 years Google will not decide to drop App Engine.

One of the points in the op-ed article we're discussing was the opportunity in this market, which makes it worth investing in. If you're still not convinced, I'd encourage you to read this interview [1] with Google's SVP of Technical Infrastructure, where he spells out a shift in the way Google develops to spend a majority of it's efforts in the cloud world.

> “It has become clear that the public cloud is the way of the future,” Hölzle says during an interview at Google headquarters. [..] “One day, this could be bigger than ads. Certainly, in terms of market potential, it is.”

If you still don't believe, Google Cloud Platform has a published deprecation policy in its Terms of Service, which is very similar to that of other major providers. In short, you get one full year's advance notice of the deprecation of any supported service.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/urs-google-stor...

One year deprecation is not long enough for anything enterprise. I wouldn't put anything in Google that can't be picked up and moved to another provider with minimal effort.

This is why I would never use Google for anything mission critical. You can't trust them to keep anything going.