Now that Compute Engine is open to the public, what protocols besides HTTP can you use from AppEngine to connect to backend Compute Engine servers?
Also, Ilya Grigorik has been advocating using SPDY for the backend, but last year he pointed out that AppEngine not does support this (http://www.igvita.com/2012/01/18/building-a-modern-web-stack-for-the-realtime-web/). Has this changed or are there plans to add support for this in the near future?