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The new Managed VMs feature in Google App Engine lets you deploy anything - including complete runtimes [1] - and you can do this with git. There's even a test pipeline where it won't get deployed unless your unit tests pass.

App Engine works at lightning speed (lets see Heroku turn up new instances of your app in O(ms)) because it's opinionated. You can trade performance for opinion - on the left end you have Google managing everything (App Engine), and on the other you have full flexibility (Compute Engine). Managed VMs, and other new features like Replica Pools and Deployment Manager [2], allow you to move toward a middle ground, where you can have Google do the automation of more flexible primitives (full VMs).

And you can absolutely migrate your technology to your own servers. AppScale [3] have an open source implementation of App Engine you can run yourself, and there's nothing stopping you use other open source databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc, on Compute Engine, and talking to those from your App Engine app.

It sounds like you've not looked at Google Cloud Platform for a while. Take a deeper look, you might be impressed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3B1BhyXXdc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZdoL5d7KC8 [3] https://github.com/AppScale/appscale/wiki