We started it in winter 2005, before AWS or almost any other cloud platform launched. The term “cloud” hadn’t even been coined yet. Our inspirations were the make-your-own-social-network platform Ning, shared CGI hosts like Dreamforce, and Salesforce’s Force.com, a limited multitenant Java host that was still years ahead of its time.
AWS managed to launch a bit ahead of us, as an a la carte IaaS with VMs, file storage, and task queues. App Engine was a serverless PaaS with built in NoSQL datastore, in memory cache, user accounts, email, and lots more.
Regardless, growth was…slow. We were very different from the status quo, so enterprises wouldn’t touch us, and we had no good migration path for existing apps, so our early users were mainly hobbyists and new companies that started on us from from scratch. Snapchat and Khan Academy are two well known examples. Thank God Google’s management didn’t expect anything of us; if we were a startup with angel investors breathing down our necks to hit growth numbers, who knows what would have happened.
Even so, you know the rest of the story. GAE blazed much of the early trail to serverless. It currently has a >$1B run rate and led to Google Cloud, the third largest cloud computing platform in the world. And it was a hell of a lot of fun to build. Too bad we didn’t do it as a startup. It probably wouldn’t hae survived, but if it did, it might have been a unicorn.