If you're evaluating something today, how does it change your decision that we were late to market with Compute Engine (and in this specific case "bring-your-own-kernel")?
If it's about future boring stuff, I think the list of boring stuff isn't too long ;).
Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
A solid guarantee with AWS is if AWS goes down, then a multitude of Amazon's services also will go down(ex Amazonian myself), so it gives me a belief that AWS's uptime is more important to Amazon itself that it is for external customers.
(Firebase Engineer here)
Before we had custom machine types (November 2015 GA), we wouldn't have been remotely close to what they needed. I'm not even sure we've had anyone evaluate the amount of overhead KVM adds in either latency or throughput.
tl;dr: Don't let Search be your "not until they do it". We've got folks in Chrome, Android, VR, and more building on top of Cloud (as well as much of our internal tooling being on App Engine specifically).
I'd love to hear what other boring stuff has been a showstopper for you, in case we missed something dumb :)