Yes. We use AWS for some of our storage and it’s indeed pretty expensive but far more configurable. We have storage that can “time out” and that lets us keep costs at bay. Still they have a lot of hidden costs e.g. we pay cents on storage but pay several orders of magnitude more on data transfer which is listed in a completely different place in the pricing list.
So when you do the initial evaluation you won’t notice that cost as you’ll be under the free quota. Then when you pass that you will probably be too deeply committed.
We use IaaS for everything now: https://medium.com/@Codename_One/migrating-from-app-engine-to-spring-boot-75de8b4566ce
It’s really easy to work with and hosting is dirt cheap (not to mention fixed price). It scales really well too especially when paired with cloudflare for the static/semi-static content. In fact it performs far better than app engine, even a $5 VPS performed faster than app engine and datastore. It’s pretty reliable and while we did have one incident of downtime it was very short. Since we had downtime issues with App Engine too (and with S3 once) I don’t think they are noticeably more reliable.
I’m sure there is some theoretical level of scale app engine can win over IaaS if we remove the cost factor. But that’s a highly theoretical level. From our experience just working with a VPS is far easier, performs better and is much cheaper. It’s also easier to manage as you don’t have all the over-engineered restrictions of App Engine.
