Google is following AWS ,. Microsoft is also following AWS . Which is not necessarily bad but doesn’t speak much of their innovation . The only play they have against AWS is fear mongering about vendor lock-in which is highly debatable anyways .
Look, both Google and AWS have areas where each excels over the other, but to say that Google isn’t innovating is to say you are basically ignorant of their offering.
In terms of paid usage, I believe AWS still has the better pricing and aggressively cuts prices for existing offerings.
I personally have seen S3 prices drop multiple times over the years I've used it.
The default pricing mechanism in AWS for on-demand instances in particular for companies that can’t afford to rewrite their non-cloud native software with tons of state and no CI/CD infrastructure or process is a boon for AWS and even at six figure monthly spend you could certainly use a 40%+ discount on your instances.
EMR is basically hosted Hadoop, which is an open source implementation of a system Google created and made famous.
Docker is based on cgroups, which was largely contributed by Google engineers. And anyone deploying docker for distributed systems will tell you that you need some kind of scheduler/orchestrator.
Amazon excels at packaging and bundling the work of others, and provides a fairly robust enterprise management layer on top of it. CloudFormation, for example, is much better than GCP’s Deployment Manager. Google is quickly catching up in the enterprise management space as well, as they take on larger customers who demand these abilities, but I still feel like AWS has a bit more capability there.
You probably should have listed Lambda, which was a nice idea out of AMZN.
AWS does a lot of things right, and we're more than happy to go toe-to-toe with them in the areas they have us beat. Competition is a sign of a healthy economy where everyone benefits. How can you compete if you don't even try to match the people you are competing against?
Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud.
Disclaimer: Google employee, not working on cloud stuff, but admire how cloud has evolved over time.
If you have a notable amount of data, they all have pretty hard lock in.
Avoiding lock-in, where reasonable (you're never going to be able to carry out something like big query as far as I can tell, and I don't work on those products or have special knowledge there) is something close to our hearts and is an important topic during design discussions of new products.
(I work for Google, on cloud, on the containerized developer workflow)