But reading about app engine is like nails on a blackboard for me after my experience . Most of what you wrote can work with a "normal" host. It would probably be for the best...
Good point. In fact, my cloud experience starts with Heroku, which is only a few-click deployment. I am learning more about cloud environments from a developer perspective, so I choose GAE because it is a direct PaaS equivalent to Heroku Dynos (with like 10x steps to set up though 😂).