This is probably going to sound a bit harsh but is adding general PHP support in 2013 newsworthy? Pretty much every 'cloud' provider has provided support for PHP for years now.
Not only that but listing things like "ability to easily read and write files from PHP" and "support for [..] mbstring and mcrypt" as new features makes me less inclined to try App engine for any PHP work as it seems even the most basic things like writing files and mcrypt require App Engine-specific code.
I'd much rather just deploy to Amazon's EC2/Rackspace/generic VPSs than have to add App engine specific changes to my code.
PaaS's are basically hosted specialized frameworks, and as such usually require framework-specific code. App Engine is Google's PaaS offering, and most of your issues seem to be "I don't want a PaaS, but prefer an IaaS or VPS".
As Google has an IaaS offering (Compute Engine), it seems odd that, given those complaints, you'd compare their PaaS offering against other provider's IaaS offerings.
This is an example of someone who's riding the hate PHP bandwagon. Honestly sick and tired of people who have no idea just what PHP is capable of who like to bash it because it's "cool".
I have come to a conclusion that the biggest haters are the ones who were unable to learn and fully understand the language. They are really quick to bash and hate because that's way easier.
Of course there are flaws and of course there are better designed languages out there, but PHP is not going anywhere.
That is pretty cool. fopen is troublesome over the network though. Correct me if I am wrong, but writing to gs:// means that the writes are replicated to something like 3 physical disks in different data centers, which means it is probably 100x slower than writing to a local disk (but infinitely more durable).
gs:// seems like a great option for file uploads, but it could be a problem with thing like asset pipelines where stat can get called absurdly often. Any thoughts?
It's certainly slower, and more durable, than local disk for writes. For reads/stat()ing this is mitigated to a certain extent by optimistic caching in memcache.
You also get the advantage, for asset pipelines, in that GCS can serve the generated file directly.
I have to agree on other providers supporting PHP supports for years, but this is a good news for PHP devs and companies. PHP is still not completely accepted in big companies, just the news that Google app engine supports PHP will lead to some confidence to invest in PHP and that the language is here to stay .
It was the most requested feature. I also asked it (amongst many thousands of others).
And now I also feel, that it's a bit late...
You have so many great companies to choose from nowadays. Great service, good infrastructure, etc.
Google is great also, but it's a bit too late, isn't it?
Not only that but listing things like "ability to easily read and write files from PHP" and "support for [..] mbstring and mcrypt" as new features makes me less inclined to try App engine for any PHP work as it seems even the most basic things like writing files and mcrypt require App Engine-specific code.
I'd much rather just deploy to Amazon's EC2/Rackspace/generic VPSs than have to add App engine specific changes to my code.