AWS now has the new arm machines in production which are cheaper. AWS also allows yearly prepaid managed databases - while Google still charges per second billing (with some monthly discount). My AWS TCO comes out to be much, much lower (almost 30%) than GCP if i take into account committed use/prepayment discounts.
For us: on AWS/Azure we had to benchmark each instance when it came up and if it performed poorly it had to be reaped and redeployed constantly. The increased overhead in dealing with things "the AWS way" was enough by itself to offset the pricing difference with the steep AWS discount we were getting.
Understanding administrative overhead is complicated but I'm sure you are taking into account the cost of humans. (or, you've already absorbed the cost of automating it?) :)
As with all things; use what works for you. I'm just very happy with GCP over the others coming from bare metal.
in terms of benchmarking - this is not something we care about (since we dont have so much CPU utilization), so probably its easier for me.
For my usecase, AWS has better administrative tools than google. I use Route 53, SES, S3 - in all those three, no other products come close (transfer acceleration...im looking at you).
The one place that I agree with you is Dataproc. That's far superior to EMR in terms of spin-up/down.
I prefer to think of reserved instances as a purely financial trick.
At the bottom line, commitment impedes change.
For example, if I have a new workload that won't fit on existing hardware with AWS, I can either: a) reserve the new instances, or b) not reserve on the assumption I will be able to optimise in the 'near' future.
In practice this is hard to know but AWS forces you to come to a correct decision up front, whereas Google Cloud allows you to not have to answer this up front without being punished later for making the 'wrong' choice.
I now have a significantly reduced opex that saves me a lot of money. If I grow very fast (and outgrow it)... I really dont care, because I will most likely have a financing event.
If I dont grow fast enough to justify the spend, I have bigger problems.
In addition, I have to commend Google and Azure here - the way they do committed use is very flexible. They price it on number of units (cores, RAM, whatever) - so if you outgrow it, you still get the discount + full cost of additional units. On AWS, if you outgrow, you have to frikking sell off your machines on their auctions and buy new ones.
Only problem is that Google doesnt do this for databases (which are very expensive)
I don't believe this is entirely true. The AWS reserved credits are good within the machine family. So a t2 credit is good for all t2 instance sizes. Not as flexible as CPU/RAM credits, but more so than it was in the past.
its not very nice. that's why they have a reserved instance marketplace - https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...
what is new is the convertible reserved instances. I havent used it - and you may be right there. But i still maintain the GCP/Azure way is light years better
I do think gcp and azure do it better though.
Separating capacity from instance type makes it much more natural and easy to use for your actual requirements.