Other that UI, I think GCP in some instances may be cheaper (pretty sure I saw some instances that were cheaper... although I can't say for sure).
And don't get me started with their documentation. What a piece of crap. It's like nobody thought that things of this nature require a clear hierarchy. It's just a blob of concepts organized in no meaningful way... Not saying that AWS is perfect, but at least with their documentation, you just gotta keep reading until you find what you need. With Google Cloud sometimes you hit these walls that take you out of context and the only solution is to close that tab and start again.
Ohh. And just to be fair with everyone crappiness in this space, Azure is even worse. Their console is another horrible experience.
Nobody in this industry thought about the UX of these things. They are all disastrous...
And believe me that I have studied this from multiple angles. I worked at AWS for two years trying to solve UX issues and it's just an endless battle. Developers deserve better user experiences... Nobody is thinking about this with the intensity and focus that it deserves.
In GCP, I can easily create networks between projects. It's really shitty to do in aws.
In GCP, I can create a machine and everyone in my team automatically has ssh access.
In GCP, I can make an instance, then mark the IP as reserved. In aws, I have to reserve the IP first.
Aws UX is the worst. I use both on an everyday basis. I could go on and on..
They both have regions. One makes it easier to see at a glance.
They both have the concept of reserved IP, one doesn't need to be set first.
They both install ssh keys for you. One does it per user, the other per instance.
One sets up cross region VPC for you. The other one makes you suffer and do it yourself.
But I was referring to things like their documentation, the way they organize resources inside the Web Console and the confusing paths to different functionality within their UI.
Yes. But that's not what I'm talking about (I'm a 9 to 5 designer so to keep my job I believe I need to have a strong enough foundation to not confuse UI and UX).
A product can be ugly but still functional. For example, HackerNews is kind of ugly but it has a decent UX. GCP sometimes has decent UIs with horrible UX or horrible UX with horrible UIs.
Of course, I'm speaking about web consoles. If we are going to talk about the whole developer experience (including the CLI, documentation, APIs, etc), I think it gets more complex than that. But as a user of both GCP and AWS, I think Google DX (developer experience) it's not great. Perhaps better in certain areas when compared to AWS, but not something that would deserve any praise.
Maybe that isn't a good argument for a business to use GCP over AWS but it is an important point.
You make claims, other fellow users counter your argument with objective statements, but you ignore everything and opt to double down on more baseless assertions. That is not helpful at all.
I don't know what type of evidence you want me to provide. It is as simple as logging in to any of these major cloud providers' web consoles and come up with your own conclusions.
- Hierarchy: A lack of hierarchy concepts and the overall feeling that everything is scattered around. No clear defined boundaries between entities. For example, they have something called API Library, which for some weird reason, seems to be the default path to enable things that are required in specific service consoles.
Also, the way they compartmentalize things. Why is there a section in the sidebar that reads "Products" and then there are other sections at the same hierarchy level like "Compute"..aren't the services under Compute products as well?
-Discoverability: Very poor discoverability across all services. For example, go down the path of enabling one of their flagship services like Google Vision. The expected path would be something like entering the console > going to the sidebar > Finding Vision > Enabling API. Does it work like that? Nope. There's only a link to the documentation that explains how to enable it.
- Visibility: Ok. Staying with the Vision example. Now I want to see my usage of this API. It would make sense to see this data inside that console. Is it there? Nope. You have to go back and start hunting down where to find this information. Apparently they expect you to know that this lives under the API console, but there's no way to know this especially if you used the CLI or one of the "Enable Buttons" within the documentation. Maybe they thought those were useful, but they just break the learnability of the platform.
I could keep going...but you get the idea. This is not usable. I don't blame them either, to be honest. Even Google and Amazon have limited resources and the UX is a low priority for them since the value proposition is coming from other areas (security, reliability, offering range, price, etc)... but I feel as this space matures this is gonna become an area where the legacy of their poor decisions will generate issues down the road.
The search within console is fantastic for finding things quickly.
I have yet to find a platform that doesn't have some amount of learning curve.
I was working on a personal project where I wanted to try a "server-less" setup and I found Google's firebase authentication pretty handy and when I was looking into Firestore I found these handy videos on Youtube that Google made that I thought were pretty good introductions ... and they even updated the videos here and there so they weren't up to date. I felt like I understood how things worked pretty quickly considering I was comming from SQL land.
I had previously been playing with AWS and tied a domain to some S3 stuff and some other things and holy crap it was pure frustration and I kept thinking using AWS that "There is nothing about how this works that I could possibly have guessed correctly without googling for a painfully long time... so if / when things go wrong how would I ever know how to fix it?"
Even when I found the "right" way to do things on AWS, just the setup felt wrong it was such a "click here click there now go back to ..." adventure.
I just felt unsure and had an uneasy feeling about AWS the entire time, even after I did it right...
Google Cloud I felt like they were trying to help me understand the complexity and once I completed the task I could do it again with limited difficulty. They also were providing services tied together for me already.
The thing that bothered me was that each entity, like S3, domain hosting, everything else I did felt like an island.
Google's version felt like a "solution" in terms of things being related documentation wise and everything else.
I fully admit that given a different situation I could feel differently about Google.
And AWS does have of course evangelists blogging about a lot of stuff. You should check out their blogs overview page [2] which lists 29 new posts since the beginning of October alone!
[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/
I'm already intimately familiar with the AWS dashboard. Just because GCP's dashboard has a bit more polish is not enough for me to switch. Even slightly lower prices may not be either.
According to this, however, AWS seems like it should be valued considerably higher (and this is in line with my industry experience - AWS is used everywhere, Google Cloud is not): https://kinsta.com/blog/google-cloud-vs-aws/
One thing I do credit them on is SSHing into an instance is a lot easier than GCP's "gcloud" way (I say this since I recently found the "gcloud" sdk to take over 10g on my laptop) and even if you use SSH on GCP, they make it considerably harder than AWS (although somewhat more secure for beginners... to prevent from attackers to getting to port 22).
Each member of your team can do it, and it works retroactively.
In conclusion, I guess both ways aren't bad. I just seem to prefer AWS here because for me it was a bit easier than GCP because I ran into several problems when sshing to GCP initially.
I came from a background where we'd created/ran all of these kinds of services in-house - simply because we started building our stuff before AWS/GCP existed in any meaningful way.
Anyway, after switching employers four years ago I had a greenfield project. I had zero investment in either platform. (I had joined a hardware company with a responsibility to build the software org. Side note: don't do that. I now understand why hardware-centric companies often can't do software - the CEO and other key people in sales/marketing simply don't understand the field at all. And that does matter. They won't even be able to understand if you're doing a good or bad job.)
My impressions were:
1) AWS had many more services than GCP
2) GCP services were generally designed better, more carefully thought out, etc. I felt that AWS APIs were designed without a very large amount of thought put into it, on an individual basis. I imagined Werner Vogels laying out edicts for a generalized service API design, and the individual teams all had to follow them, or else. And then the individual team built each service, without being able to change the general API design guidelines.
GCP services meanwhile seemed they like they were built by a smaller (and more talented) team with more team cohesion and communication. They traded a better design for a slower API/service output over time.
3) GCP was cheaper.
* GCP gave me the feeling it was designed with taste, through every layer. Comparing this to the desktop platform fight; think Apple. Quality over volume.
* AWS gave me the feeling it was designed without taste. Think Microsoft. Volume over quality.
I'm talking about the combination of service design criteria, APIs, documentation, etc.
Another way of thinking about it: GCP is clearly designed by hackers schooled in the ways of UNIX over a very long time. Simplicity and elegance is valued very highly in terms of designs. For AWS: Simplicity is clearly not a design goal.
I've found the only way to make anything work in AWS is to search for hours and hours looking for the Stack Overflow question that tells you what the docs left out. And yet I stick with AWS because last time I tried Azure everything was broken. It'll be nice when this stuff gets a little more polished.