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Comment by runeks | Hacker News Reader

I use GCP for hobby projects because it’s simpler than AWS, has a better GUI and better documentation.

For a commercial project I would probably go with AWS, since I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about GCP support.

I’ve been scared away from Azure after using it for a couple of courses at university. It just seemed half-baked: lots of GUI glitches/bugs (e.g. reliably needing to press a button exactly twice). It just seemed like one of those Microsoft products that only exist because the best product in the category isn’t owned by Microsoft already.

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>It just seemed like one of those Microsoft products that only exist because the best product in the category isn’t owned by Microsoft already.

They've bet the future of the company on it, it's definitely not a product that only exists because the best product in the category isn't owned by them.

Short of Microsoft as a company going under, Azure won't be going anywhere. There are countless companies that will not do business with Amazon due to them being direct competitors and Azure tends to be the place they land. As others have noted, while there may be some technical gaps between Azure and AWS, they more than make up for it with their legacy enterprise domain knowledge and support (in my experience).

GCP under Kurian appears to be trying to cater to that same subset of customers, but the culture of Google still seems to be a pretty major uphill battle when it comes to being "enterprise friendly".

I've had good experience with Linode for my personal projects. They have a lot of cloud products nowadays like S3 buckets, so its no longer just VPSs.

Azure by far has the best customer support, great for commercial use

Ive used Azure and AWS in a couple of large organizations (mulit-million $ cloud contracts) and the Azure commitment for customer success is a big differentiator. Ive literally had Azure engineers as an extension of my team (free of cost offered by azure as part of customer success teams) so much so that they start blending into the team. The Azure products have steadily gotten better (ADB, Azure SQL, Functions etc) over the years (with a few duds as expected). AWS - it didnt matter how big we were, we still got the feeling they never really leant in or they had "more important" stuff to focus on than customer success. All the POCs/side projects we have done on GCP - it has always felt like something built by a bunch of seriously talented technologists FOR technologists. Support seemed a distant entity just like most google products - that has led to significant nervousness at the top leadership to invest in a product that may not be Google's highest priority.

GCP has vastly worse documentation than AWS unfortunately.

I have to disagree with that, I've found GCP docs to be much more informative and easier to digest.

I find the AWS docs too verbose, however it’s quite possible that doing something in AWS is just more complicated than doing it in GCP. In that case the issue is not with the docs, but with the complexity of AWS vs GCP. Either way GCP has an advantage here.

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