GAE sandboxes you with their proprietary libraries, whereas AWS lets you write for unix/windows platform with minimal sandboxing. If you want to write a LAMP stack, you can just write a regular old LAMP stack with AWS. With GAE, you have to learn their java/python server libraries, then their blobstore/google cloud storage/googleQL, and so on.

Sure, but GAE has zero setup and administration and infinite scaling.

Myself, I prefer something like gondor.io, that looks very much like a dedicated server but also has zero setup/administration.

If price is an issue, you can't beat an actual dedicated server, though.

Would like to point out that one of the important information from egillie comment is this:

"their java/python..."

Yes, Google's version of Java. Not JDK/JEE.

Thanks for the breakdown. I haven't used t he service yet but I can see how that would be painful to deal with, especially if one wants to move their service in the future.

4 years later and they still haven't figured out how to offer ssl on custom domains.

we're using SSL on a custom domain at https://www.blossom.io in the trusted tester program and it works like a charm.

What kind of animal did you have to sacrifice to get into that program?

It's only good enough for hosting blogs and experiments?

GAE forces profound vendor lock-in relative to AWS, which is itself already guilty of this compared to a normal infrastructure solution.