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Disclaimer: I don't know if Heroku PaaS locks you in as much as say, GAE

In my (limited) experience: not by a long shot. Heroku setups may seem locked in, but GAE is obscene. No outgoing HTTP requests, no normal DB, basically everything is GAE specific. Heroku is not the most generic thing out there, but, by God, it's still miles better than GAE.

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The key is that Heroku is trying to support all major web app frameworks, whereas GAE only supports the GAE framework.

The tradeoff is super interesting: using their framework allows them to hella optimize the instance for you, but you're pretty darn stuck with it :/

No outgoing HTTP requests? GAE has URL Fetch API from first day.

Also, GAE can now run docker and also connect to MySQL running on Google Cloud infrastructure, which is a separate offering.

Sorry for not being explicit. My point was: you need to use a special API to do outgoing HTTP requests. This leads to vendor lock-in. In Heroku, you just do it.

No you don't. You still use your language's standard library. But GAE uses their own version behind the scenes. You code still uses urllib if on Python and net/http if using Go.

So in GAE too, you just do it.

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