It seems that you are talking about features. I never said that AWS UX isn't horrible. It is. But GCP is also pretty shitty. They don't deserve any praise in this area at all. They have useful features but that doesn't mean their UX is good.
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.