Greetings folks! One of the App Engine PMs here. That couldn't be further from the truth - we absolutely want people to use App Engine. If you want to manage your own infrastructure, Google Compute Engine is great. If you want something that scales automatically, and requires less management - App Engine is a great option. We've actually made a ton of changes recently, specifically on our support for docker based runtimes, new docs, and new runtime support (like nodejs, ruby, python3, etc).
Apologies you had a bad experience. There's no doubt the original App Engine had some... quirks.
You may want to take a look at Managed VMs. All of the new runtimes are based on Docker images, are entirely extensible, and don't require the use of the original App Engine APIs:
I think technically that command is still hidden lol. You can run it, it just doesn't show up in the docs. We'll be officially releasing that one in a few weeks.
https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-node#clo...