Node.js is maintained by Joyent, who is in a way a competitor of Google.

Node.js has no link what so ever with Google but is in fact built on top of an open source project started by Google.

Google might jumped into this business just like Azure did, but there are already so many PaaS doing it, it might not be worth it. I have never used GAE, but my understanding is that it is quite different that other PaaS and you have to use GAE libraries to make your code run.

Which, this is my personal feeling, is not really what the Node.js community is looking for. Node.js is used to quickly make a fast lightweight app, a big share for APIs for Phone apps for example.

Nevertheless if you are looking for a PaaS for Node.js, the are quite a few out there:

Joyent (nodejitsu)
dotCloud which has WebSockets support.
Windows Azure
Nodester (bought by App Fog recently)
Any Cloud Foundry host should support Node.js too.
and many more...

Those are just some names off the top of my head. There quite a few but those are the major ones. Oh there is Heroku too, but they don't have support for WebSocket which is a bummer for any Socket.IO based app.

As of June 2014, Google had a limited preview for custom languages on Google App Engine (which is different from Google Compute Engine).

Watch Building Node.js applications with App Engine and Custom Runtimes and check out https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/:

App Engine now offers a second hosting option: Managed VMs. The Managed VM hosting environment lets you run App Engine applications on configurable Compute Engine Virtual Machines (VMs). You can also use Managed VMs to deploy user-configurable custom runtimes, such as for Node.js and other runtimes.

The procedure to get into the beta is:

Sign up and create a Managed VM project

Managed VMs are in Limited Preview, you must sign up for access to this feature, create a billing-enabled project, and tell us about your project so we can whitelist it to run in a Managed VM. Follow these steps:

Sign up for access to Managed VMs.
Join the app-engine-managed-vms Google Group to participate in discussions about Managed VMs.
Projects (or apps - they are the same thing) must be in a U.S. data center. If you're planning to use an existing project, skip to the next step. Otherwise, create a new app in a U.S. data center. Navigate to https://preview.appengine.google.com and create a new app.
Enable billing for the project. Visit the page https://cloud.google.com/console/project/apps~, where is the ID of your project. Click on Settings in the left menu and then enable billing. If your app is billed under a Premier account, email us at app-engine-managed-vm-tt-id@google.com to have your new Cloud project billed under the same account.
Send an email to app-engine-managed-vm-tt-id@google.com with the application ID in the subject line.

When we receive your email, we’ll configure some resources behind the scenes and notify you via email when your project is ready to go. The email includes final instructions for setup. If you encounter an error while following these instructions, contact us at app-engine-managed-vm-tt-id@google.com.

You can easily install node on Google Compute Engine (which basically is a virtual computer). Here is a link: https://developers.google.com/datastore/docs/getstarted/start_nodejs/

Regards Lars

after years of experiences in google appengine, i switch to other cloud services now.

i think google appengine is actually an old fashion service in cloud computing industry. which is slow to new technology, difficult to deploy, time wasting to learn the apis and lacking of a lot of features you need in languages you use.

regardless of google's large community, i would not suggest anyone to use google appengine.

[newer paas]

i strongly recommend you to use openshift, appfog, heroku .etc's new paas cloud computing technologies, which are far more extensible, less change needing, more migrable from one platform to another, more freely coding in the beauty of the natural lanuage and its standard libraries without ugly platform specific apis.

[iaas]

if you want more control over the running os environment, you may give linode, digital ocean, amazon, google cloud engine, microsoft azure etc. iaas providers a try.

Because App Engine is a platform-as-a-service, and in order to add a new language/stack to GAE, Google need to create mid-level libraries that interface with the plethora of App Engine's services.

Moreover, all App Engine apps is sandboxed and has several functionalities restricted from inside their sandbox environment. This means that beside the need to create service libraries, Google also need to create a secured sandbox environment for any language/stack that they try to introduce into GAE.

I personally think the second reason is why Google does not introduce support for new language/stack as aggressive as Azure did. App Engine is, in a way, more 'managed' than Azure, and has a larger initial development cost for new language/stack.

Node.js has recently enabled support for Google Cloud users. The main document pages are:

It seems to require at the moment a Computer Engine.

Google is a software-conservative company. Programming a backend in JavaScript would be absolutely unimaginable for Google's managers. Creating infrastructure Google itself won't be using is not a good investment. Reference: Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

why is javascript node.js not on google app engine

Sign up and create a Managed VM project