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Comment by ctippett | Hacker News Reader

Google App Engine came out in 2008, several years before AWS Lambda. I'd also argue the developer experience (especially for its time) was pretty fantastic.

If you're wanting 'serverless' compute these days you'd probably deploy to something like Cloud Run – containers being the ultimate hedge against vendor lock-in.

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I would love to use Google's cloud, but I just can't risk my email, map, and browser services being cut off because some AI determined that my application looks suspicious, with no human customer support to contact, as has been reported multiple times.

Actually I find their support to be pretty good. Granted I am at a large tech company who likely pays for premium support, but I can always get through to a human who knows what they're talking about. They've even helped with issues inside my app that were my fault.

You could probably profitably resell that kind of access to people who lost everything and have no other way to reach them.

Phone support is tied to an account. It doesn't work on random accounts.

I tried moving off Gmail, I really did. But all the EU-based alternatives just suck so much. So now I'm back to Gmail, but I pay for it (Google Workspace). This way I at least have a commercial relationship with Google which gives me various contractual rights, and access to phone support. I also have a contingency plan: I have my email address on my own domain, and I backup my mailbox once in a while, so that I can migrate off Gmail should I need to do that at some point.

Have you considered Zoho? It's a company based in India, but they have European servers.

We tried zoho. Had to move as the servers reputation was awful. Maybe you get your own ip if you do enterprise?

I only use it for my personal mail with my own domain

I don't know when Heroku launched, but that's where GAE fits in the summary to me - it's 'serverless' in the 'not managing a server' sense, but there's some conflation (at least in the article, but generally too I think) with a 'function as a service' model, which is inherently a subset of serverless I suppose, and where Lambda sits.

Heroku was founded in 2007 by Orion Henry, James Lindenbaum, and Adam Wiggins.

I’m a big fan of Cloud Run.

Add a Dockerfile Create a service and link to GitHub Push to main Done

Sure there are all the usual risks of using Google services (might go away, might get locked out) but that container makes it reasonably quick to get back up and running.

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