The issue reported here is linked to App Engine and Gmail tightening up their spam filters. The root cause was an increase in organizations sharding out their spam systems to utilize App Engine’s free tier in such a way that is (a) in direct violation of our ToS and (b) making all of our lives suck a bit more (raise your hand if you want spam). It’s unfortunate that while App Engine is trying to provide a free tier that enables developers to easily use our platform, others see it as an opportunity for exploitation. Even more unfortunate is that it has a negative effect on legitimate users. It’s a fine balance that has been highlighted by several users within this thread.
Spam filtering is not a perfect science, and we’re constantly tweaking things -- with our customers in mind. This issue should be limited to new applications where the trust signal might be a bit lower. Thus existing apps / customers shouldn’t be experiencing issues (which was also highlighted by a few within this thread). If this isn’t the case email me: [email protected]. For those asking, “hey, why am I being penalized for being a new customer?” See my previous comment about spam filtering not being a perfect science. Then email me.
To your first point though, streaming services typically are more focused on storage and egress (network) optimizations. App Engine has integration points with each, but its core workloads fall more in the dynamic web app and mobile backend realm. Within Spotify's architecture, there are places where App Engine makes sense (e.g. hosting their frontend APIs). That said, this is small relative to the rest of their architecture and understandably isn't the first area of focus when you're making a move to a new vendor.
True that Google stills uses it internally, but external usage exists way beyond Snapchat (although they are a fun customer). App Engine hasn't been in maintenance mode, although we have set aside engineering cycles to improve the reliability and stability of the service in order to ensure the highest level of support for production-grade customers. In tandem, we've some large features such Go, PHP, full-text search, and Cloud Storage support. We've added integration with the Cloud Console as well as Cloud SDK to allow developers to build hybrid solutions that span, for example, App Engine and Compute Engine. And, yes, we've invested in the App Engine Managed VM environment with a host of new runtimes including Java 8, Python 3, Go, PHP, and Node.js. We have more coming there over the next 2-3 months. Guido leaving was tough, I used to share an office with him. That said, I'm not sure that his exit was the writing on the wall.
Disclaimer: I'm the lead for the App Engine product team.
Google Drive / apps script integration is a great idea. Unifying our storage offerings across the entire company is a great idea too (but an aside for this conversation). I disagree with the "get something out" mentality, though. Shipping a fully managed runtime that scales as well as Java, Python, and Go, that is hardened, and is secure enough that we'll run it next to Gmail, Search, Geo, etc. is no easy task. It's not something you decide to do on a whim a few weeks before i/o.
I'm assuming that you're actually talking about Node and not just HTML + JS. Ultimately it wasn't a choice to do one and not the other, it was a choice of which to tackle first (and PHP had some technical advantages which allowed us to move faster). Ultimately we want to surface, or allow others to surface, any runtime in a fully managed way. Yes, Node, Ruby, C# are often discussed (as are many others, including moving Go to GA). We're investing, we'll get there, and this is only the first of many steps.
For many applications they require a CMS and PHP clearly owns the market space here with Wordpress and Drupal -- strategic in terms of driving growth and new business. We also believe that since App Engine was built with multitenancy in mind from day one that it's a more secure, hardened environment -- better for developers. Finally, and to my point above, the majority of the internet has been built with PHP whether folks like it or not. We want to bring the benefits of cloud to this large corpus of developers -- advancing computing rather than stagnating it.
Our goal is to advance computing (via services such as HRD, Cloud Datastore, BigQuery, and Go) in ways that align with existing developer practices (investments in Java and now the release of PHP). There's no point in releasing amazing solutions if there is a huge barrier to entry.
-- Chris