I never really meant to imply that App Engine doesn't make it a lot easier to build and administer your code.
It's more than just a price/stability tradeoff. The problem is, as an App Engine user, one is totally at the mercy of any future price changes on App Engine because it is nearly impossible to seamlessly migrate away.
The DNS aliases (appspotchat.com, for instance) can only point to Google, and the API does not really work well on any other platform such as AppScale. So, as we discovered, at any time in the future, one's service could suddenly cost 10x as much, and one won't really have the option to move quickly. If one intends to scale, it's better to never get into that state in the first place, and develop on AWS instead. If EC2 raises its prices (highly unlikely since computing power is increasing and costs are decreasing), one can always move to rackspace or just get a private server.
It's of course true that writing stuff on App Engine can sometimes require a lot less engineering work. But the difference is not really that substantial when compared to the possibility of being stuck on a platform that all of a sudden makes your company unprofitable in unpredictable ways. Changing a running service is very hard. Avoiding the problem by not getting stuck on App Engine is not trivial, but in my opinion the right call.
a) You are upset about the fact that they increased their prices when they transitioned from a well documented beta service to a fully supported commercial offering.
b) You are upset that there is some features missing, such as the way DNS is handled.
c) You are upset that there is a proprietary nature about the service.
I think those are all pretty much valid concerns, but let me address them:
Yes, the costs did go up for some people, including you, it seems. But remember again, it wasn't just some random increase. They switched out of beta. There was never a hint at a promise that they would keep the prices at the same level.
As I mentioned before, they admitted they messed up in their messaging. They heard people screaming at them loud and clear and went back and actually adjusted a lot of their prices. You say that AWS won't increase prices because of costs decreasing, I can only hope that GAE, with a similar model will do the same.
That said, you really can't compare GAE with AWS because they are entirely different offerings. You absolutely need an IT staff (be it yourself or someone else) to run, monitor and manage those servers on AWS. You don't need that with GAE and I find that to be a massive selling point. I've seen first hand what happens when you have to hire IT staff or stay up at 3am figuring out what server problems you are having. It sucks because a) it is nearly impossible to hire good sysadmins right now, b) who wants to be on call 24/7? There is also the lack of the high replication datastore on AWS. There is nothing even close. Personally, I'm willing to have a bit of vendor lockin for those features.
Yes, features are missing. Google knows about it and has been doing regular releases of the SDK to address missing features. I'm pretty confident that as the service becomes more profitable for them, they will dedicate more resources to it. If not, then I have 3 years to migrate and find something else. For now, the feature set is good enough for me. That might not have been the case for you, but that isn't entirely the fault of anyone. It is still a maturing product.
It's more than just a price/stability tradeoff. The problem is, as an App Engine user, one is totally at the mercy of any future price changes on App Engine because it is nearly impossible to seamlessly migrate away.
The DNS aliases (appspotchat.com, for instance) can only point to Google, and the API does not really work well on any other platform such as AppScale. So, as we discovered, at any time in the future, one's service could suddenly cost 10x as much, and one won't really have the option to move quickly. If one intends to scale, it's better to never get into that state in the first place, and develop on AWS instead. If EC2 raises its prices (highly unlikely since computing power is increasing and costs are decreasing), one can always move to rackspace or just get a private server.
It's of course true that writing stuff on App Engine can sometimes require a lot less engineering work. But the difference is not really that substantial when compared to the possibility of being stuck on a platform that all of a sudden makes your company unprofitable in unpredictable ways. Changing a running service is very hard. Avoiding the problem by not getting stuck on App Engine is not trivial, but in my opinion the right call.