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Comment by jsolson | Hacker News Reader

> a lot of developers hate it

Any particular complaints?

(I work on Compute Engine)

Not GP, but GCP's GUI is incredibly confusing and difficult to use. It is clearly a variety of products (poorly) stitched together. That has nothing to do with Compute Engine, and AWS is just as bad (if not worse).

My new projects will all be on Azure because Microsoft has pivoted to a company with reliable investment in UI, developer-friendliness, and long-term support. Serving businesses has also been a core of their company from the beginning, whereas Google seems unwilling to provide the human support required and AWS is clearly at odds with Amazon's primary culture.

It does seem like the underlying products in GCP are very good, but they mostly seem to replicate other offerings from Azure and AWS.

There are also those such as myself who instead feel that Azure's UI is by far by worst of the big three, and that GCP is not bad at all, and that AWS is big, complex, and ugly, yet practical. The long term support story of AWS is also great.

> The long term support story of AWS is also great

I agree in general, but specific services can be a problem. New server images have broken my apps, waiting for AWS to update support for languages or RDBMS can be painful, documentation is generally confusing (mostly because there are 10 ways to do every simple thing), and I bump into bugs regularly.

At my last work I was a developer occasionally doing things with their AWS account.

I now run a large application mostly built in GCP and also now replicated in Azure for various compliance reasons.

So although my experience with the 3 clouds is not equal, I've been exposed to them all, and actually massively prefer GCP for the UIs and CLI tools.

AWS stll has better support by third party tools, and Azure is lagging behind everything.

Thanks for the feedback here -- as I mentioned in another comment I'm generally fond of our UIs, and it's nice to know that I'm not _entirely_ crazy.

Thanks for the feedback -- I'd be curious to understand what about the Azure UI you find most striking. For obvious reasons, I don't have much experience with it.

I'm generally fond of our console, particularly the tools that show both the API and CLI invocations for most UI activities. On the other hand, I work on core virtualization, so the things I want to express tend to be very simple ("make me a giant VM", "make me a gianter VM", etc. :)

A big weakness is that all services have generic names so it is IMPOSSIBLE to google them and the documentation is weak and hard to navigate.

Thanks for the comment -- I think (although I honestly don't know for certain) that the goal is for the names to convey something about what the service does. In particular, so that in the context of the catalog the general purposes of the various services are at least _somewhat_ obvious.

The docs are always a work in progress -- anything you can recall trying to do with GCP that was particularly inscrutable (can't fix everything in one go, but one fix at a time is better than nothing :)

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