But is it really worth the headache of such a Frankenstein architecture?
I initially fell in love with the "no sysadmin" aspect of App Engine, and started building apps around it. Eventually I realized that (for me, anyway) the upside isn't really worth the trouble of having to contort my apps to work in Google's sandbox- can't run SQL, have to deal with datastore timeouts, CPU timeouts, etc. When you're done coding work-arounds for all of these things, are you really coming out ahead?
This is so true. The first step to correcting a problem is admitting you have one, and everyone on App Engine clearly does (locked-in). What I'm doing about it? Moving to Tornado/MongoDB/EC2 as quickly as possible.
I initially fell in love with the "no sysadmin" aspect of App Engine, and started building apps around it. Eventually I realized that (for me, anyway) the upside isn't really worth the trouble of having to contort my apps to work in Google's sandbox- can't run SQL, have to deal with datastore timeouts, CPU timeouts, etc. When you're done coding work-arounds for all of these things, are you really coming out ahead?