Over the years, AWS has put their focus entirely on "Enterprise" customer functionality as opposed to "developer friendly" capabilities.
I once found a race in the UI, reported it with complete repro instructions, and then Google made me have to do a 30 minute hangout meeting where I had to repro the bug in front of the Google engineer. The call resulted in two different tickets... we found another bug.
So gcloud might have some nicer features, but the engineees building the web app seem to have some basic misunderstandings about concurrency. The BigQuery UI (new one not the old one) is similarly riddled with bugs.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quickstarts/latest/vmlaunch/step...
(But..yeah, at a time it was an applet)
The way they describe tying SSH keys to IAM roles very closely matches the SSH key management that GCE had when it launched back in 2012.
FWIW, it sounds like one advantage of the new AWS service is that it will provision a new SSH key each time you connect. Whereas, I _think_ the GCP one provisions one key per machine.
You're mostly right about gcloud, with some nuances for multi-user or network-homedir environments among other exceptions.
Gcloud does however have one of the snazziest possible hacks for resetting and securely communicating Windows account passwords:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/windows/auto...
Transcript from Alphabet Q1 2019 Earnings Call; April 29, 2019 [1]
> Sundar Pichai, CEO Google:
> We are also deeply committed to becoming the most customer-centric cloud provider for enterprise customers, and making it easier for companies to do business with us thanks to new contracting, pricing, and more. Today, 9 of the world's 10 largest media companies, 7 of the 10 largest retailers, and more than half of the 10 largest companies in manufacturing, financial services, communications, and software use Google Cloud.
> Some of the companies that we announced at Next included: The American Cancer Society and McKesson in Healthcare; Media and Entertainment companies like USA Today and Viacom; Consumer Packaged Goods brands like Unilever; Manufacturing and Industrial companies like Samsung and UPS; and Public Sector organizations like Australia Post.
> Finally, to support our customers' growth, we also announced the addition of two new Cloud regions in Seoul and Salt Lake City, which we plan to open in 2020. These new Cloud regions will build on our current footprint of 19 Cloud regions and 58 data centers around the world.
This doesn't seem like just a hobby to Google.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019_Q1_Earnings_Transcr...
Do you understand how expensive this action is?
You know how it goes. They built their business on Google's platform, and it was a dream until some AI detected a pattern of activity it didn't like and they were excommunicated. The app was shut down, the website stopped getting traffic, and all they money they had charged customers via Google Pay was frozen. No appeals, emails go to /dev/null and after a month of campaigning on social media they finally get an email from an intern saying that after review, they won't be changing the automated decision.
No thanks.