Shower thought: Google App Engine was the original AWS Lambda of the late 2000s.

Okay, it literally was not, it was just “platform as a service”, morally equivalent to Heroku, right? Well, sure it didn’t have all the non-web event handling stuff, but it was in many ways closer to Lambda than to Heroku. Namely it did not run just any app, it would “insert itself into your code” – e.g. Python WSGI apps had to be adapted with a special module – which is exactly how it is in Lambda!

And around 2010 GAE did feel like the place for letting someone else run your random hobby project for free “forever”. Well, hm, any PaaS or FaaS with a free tier should be like that. Soooo I just went to check if this ancient project is up. Nope. I guess with the absorption of GAE into Google Cloud, things changed so much that not ever signing into GCloud (and so not accepting new terms etc.) leads to the app being shut down. Well, that kind of thing is very much expected from Google by now.