If anything I had much more troubles with the datastore than with any other DB ever. We are migrating away and the day it's over will be thz biggest profesional relief I've experienced.
I guess you coule consider that you don't need to manage it, but the trade off is that you have to go around all the limitations through nasty software hacks instead of just a simple configuration.
I also am curious to know what sorts of problems you've had.
I have noticed that people tend to get into trouble when they force the datastore to be something it's not. For example, I mentioned that it's terrible for analytics - there are no aggregation queries.
In the case of the tshirt retailer, I replicated a portion of our data into a database that was good for analytics (postgres, actually). We could afford to lose the analytics dashboard for a few hours due to a poorly tested migration (and did, a few times), but the sales flow never went down.
The datastore is not appropriate for every project (which echoes the original article) but it's a good tool when used appropriately.
It definitely sounds like they shouldn't have used datastore in the first place if it's giving them that much trouble. A common pattern we use is to replicate the data in bigquery, either by stream or batch job that flows over pubsub - perfectly scalable and resilient to failure.
