I think App Engine was really ahead of its time in showing how simple cloud deployments can be. It had a similar ease of use as setting up a YouTube account. For that reason, a lot of people thought of it as a toy, which was kind of unfair because companies like Niantic were able to build global products on it. So a lot of Google Cloud afterward ended up being designed to be more "normal" like how Amazon is. Now people are seeing what normal gets them, so maybe it's going to be time for the Google way of doing things to finally shine. (Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee)
App Engine caused a huge innovator's dilemma for Google when it came to cloud. It only addressed a set of use cases around web application development- Folks would ask "why shoudl we build a low-margin cloud?" and I'd tell people: "if I can't import numpy, App Engine is useless to me". Eventually, the useful bits of AE were extracted to other services with APIs (datastore is one example), but it wasn't until google built a full GCP that they started to see real cloud growth (revenue).
"Normal" is what most of us want.
App Engine was the OG serverless before "serverless" was even a term:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
C and Perl CGI, and later PHP, would like a word ...
(CGI is a webserver starting a binary in response to a web request, essentially piping the request into stdin and sending stdout back to the client, in some ways it's brilliantly simple and very unix-y)
Oh in terms of coding, definitely other simple options existed. But you still had to go through the work of provisioning a server, deploying your code to it, and then getting a public IP address and a domain name before you could access it. I meant in terms of going from "0 to Cloud", GAE was ahead of its time.
Most ISPs let you host CGI and later PHP files on your account, to encourage people to make websites. A guestbook, for example. For a while this was really popular.
Oooh, that's interesting, I was not aware of that!
I totally second this. AppEngine was way ahead of its time. I used it for all my projects back then. The only reason I stopped using it for clients because even internal Google employees had no idea when the plug might be pulled out on AppEngine. AppEngine supported Elixir far earlier than anyone else (Elixir is my main go-to stack)
Ah, that's a shame they went that way. What I tell people when they're first getting into GCP is that it's gonna be a passion to set up what you want. But, the offerings are great, and once it's working, it'll just work