When Google App Engine came out (2008), its runtime was a strange "subset" of Python. You couldn't bind to C libraries, open sockets, run background threadsβ¦ To fetch data you had to: ππππ ππππππ.πππππππππ.πππ ππππππ ππππππππ ππππππ = ππππππππ.πππππ("ππππ://β¦") When AWS EC2 came out (2006), you could do β¨ anything β¨. Over time GCP realized that the restrictions did not make sense, and that people wanted to have full control and versioning over their runtimes. They didn't want "Google's Python", they wanted Python. AWS in the meantime accrued an insurmountable lead. We're now, strangely, seeing the same play out with JavaScript runtimes today. I fully expect the "VendorJS" days to be numbered. Save this tweet.