Two things keep coming up while comparing GCP and AWS:
* This accomplishment would not have been possible for our three-person team of engineers with out Google Cloud (AWS is too low level, hard to work with and does not scale well).
* We’ve also managed to cut our infrastructure costs in half during this time period (Per minute billing, seamless autoscaling, performance, sustained usage discounts, ... )
As someone who has worked on large-scale deployments on both AWS and GCP, I would always prefer AWS over GCP. While GCP products are IMO superior to similar AWS offerings their support (even premium tier) is total garbage compared to AWS.
Google Cloud is great and cheap. But AWS is waaay more ahead in terms of completeness. I've looked into this. The breadth, depth, and polish of AWS is really impressive. Their API Gateway -> lambda container -> DataStore is amazing. I really wish I could use GCP. :(
Hopefully GCP will start pushing AWS to lower their prices. They charge so much.
GCP's biggest problem is trust. People (rightfully) don't trust that GCP won't do a rug pull with their production workloads. GCP has done that with both pricing and killing off services.
If you are an infrastructure provider, the first thing people are paying you for is to be a stable foundation. If there is no stable foundation there is no trust.
Its really hard to imagine GCP fixing this without new leadership. Hire someone from AWS who knows what they are doing. AWS doesn't do this shit. AWS goes so far out of its way to not break customer workloads.
Is GCP really a failure? I think the product is OK and they seem to have some big customers. They're maybe #3 in the space, but you can make a lot of money without being #1.
Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA), but the price is right. At my last company with 4 engineers we were paying AWS ~$1000/month for support. At my current company back when we had a cloud service on GCP, we got weekly calls with support for $0/month. Folks at Google also seemed to approve my weird resource requests (tons of GPUs in the midst of a GPU shortage, etc.) without me going through any back channels. I didn't find it terrible to work with at all, and it was much cheaper than AWS.
I have to disagree. After using AWS & GCP, I find AWS “stays out of my way” much much better and has much better documentation. There are weird corners of GCP, like GCS “interop” mode and lack of full compatibility with S3 APIs that feel basically like Google is using dark patterns.
AWS is head & shoulders the better cloud provider. Google is just cheaper.
Why do people trust AWS in a way that they don't trust GCP? Its because of things like this.
One of the most important things about building on top of a cloud platform is that the platform needs to not move out from under you! That means, don't turn off features and services I'm depending on. It also means don't completely change the pricing model after I've built a business around the old model. AWS knows this and has a 15 year history of giving customers this stability.
GCP on the other hand has a track record of changing pricing models and turning off services. It has gotten to the point where I am simply not comfortable using GCP to build on, even if their solution is technically superior to AWS. I just can't trust that they won't pull the rug out from under me again.
GCP has a major problem with their reputation, and it doesn't seem like they are even aware of it.
As someone who works on an MLOps platform that allows you to use your own clusters, I have to check multiple cloud providers for testing.
GCP is wonderful compared to AWS. It took me a week to sign up for AWS, including writing an issue and a phone call. It took other colleagues some hacky ways to start to use it, even at the sign-up phase.
Doing something on GCP is pretty straightforward. Creating VMs, Kubernetes clusters, etc. I've had non technical people do it successfully on their own. Live. While observed and under pressure.
AWS? Good lord. That's what I will say about it as I'd rather say good things about a good service than bad things about another.
I’m ex google. I still have friends on the cloud team. I’ve built on aws and gcp.
If you asked me aws or gcp I’d say aws. Having seen the sausage factory from the inside I cannot say I have a greater trust in G than in Amazon.
The biggest thing for me is GCP documentation is garbage. If you don’t know everything already you’re going to have to figure some things out. AWS documentation is adequate. GCP DOCUMENTATION IS NOT.
It seems Google is very interested in making GCP a platform for companies that really need to build cloud-based distributed systems first and foremost. It's a cloud-native IaaS platform. AWS, which I also use extensively FWIW, has always felt more like a platform for porting existing on-premise applications onto. You can build atop of AWS at any stage of the game, but it never quite feels like it's anymore than a bunch of very integrated parts with various degrees of quality.
* This accomplishment would not have been possible for our three-person team of engineers with out Google Cloud (AWS is too low level, hard to work with and does not scale well).
* We’ve also managed to cut our infrastructure costs in half during this time period (Per minute billing, seamless autoscaling, performance, sustained usage discounts, ... )
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