How far ahead is AWS in comparison of other Cloud Providers? I only use the basic services (compute, storage, cloud functions, etc). But for people with advance use cases, are GCP and others even comparable?
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a bit of a joke. I really don't think it is all that competitive. Its trying to stay caught up and they do offer a lot of similar services. But their documentation is all over the place. Their service administration is a disaster. You can tell that each product is built by separate teams that only meet together once a quarter over Zoom. Its very disjointed. GCP is definitely trying to play catch-up. That isn't to say that you couldn't build a powerful platform ontop of GCP, many respectable companies are doing it. Discord is one that comes to mind that is (or at least was...) built entirely on GCP. I don't want to say it is shit. But its not as cohesive as Azure and AWS.
Basically AWS and Azure are the two core competitors. I really think that in practical (non-niche, using core services) they are neck and neck. GCP is in the race, but definitely lagging behind the others.
* BigQuery
* Tighter k8s integration with GKE
* Single message service (PubSub)
Unless BigQuery is your first class citizen, I would avoid GCP.
I would only consider them if I need a massive scale of something they are cheaper on, that can quickly be migrated elsewhere.
If you sign a service contract with Google (which you will if you are spending any amount of serious money), then you will have a precisely defined guarantee that they will continue operating GCloud.