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I'll give the internet credit, it took two full days to really start tearing into AppEngine.

From screams of vendor lockin ( here and here) to purists calling the framework a pollution of python and django (here and here) criticism has been swift and some times rather vicious.

The size of Google has made people start to put on tinfoil hats with every new product. Considering the scope of AppEngine, it's not that surprising that it gets conspiracy theories right from the start.

As I've had my nose buried in PHP and Drupal for what amounts to most of the last year, Google's announcement of AppEngine took me a bit by surprise.

A few months ago, we looked into setting up a production server using S3 + EC2. The combination works well and is a fraction of the cost in comparison to the fully managed hosting we currently use. The lack of an Amazon backed persistent storage filesystem forces you to have a solid recovery plan, but in all other regards, Amazon's scalability lets us compete at a level not possible without serious infrastructure investment. From a business perspective, Amazon is cost effective and accessible provided you have some linux sysadmin talent sitting around (or are willing to hire some).