Why does AWS dominate cloud so thoroughly?

The poster really underrates being first and biggest, and IME overrates the value of Office to the CIO, especially for a drastically unrelated product like Azure.

The real keys for AWS are time in market and mindshare. They were pretty well the sole active player for what, half a decade? While it's not a guarantee of success if you spot any business five years of active growth and selling they're going to be hard to displace.

Tacking onto another comment, companies aren't just leaving GCP for AWS - the NSA recently left Microsoft to award Amazon a $10 billion contract [1].

Mindshare is definitely key, but there's also the fact that AWS has been around longer and has a more robust services offering. And as the first mover, AWS has been able to set the market standard for pricing.

That's a double-edged sword though, and many businesses are dramatically overpaying for AWS services [2].

On a related note, I built Usage.AI [3] to automatically buy and sell Reserved Instances on AWS to cut costs.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/amazon-web-services-re-awarded-nsa-... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/04/19/cl... [3] https://usage.ai

Having used both AWS and GCP extensively I completely agree. Google’s offering shows an almost pathological disgust for their customers.

1) Documentation is not customer centric (customers are ultimately trying to get a thing done. That thing is their search term. All of your documentation should be structured around “how to do X”)

2) Support is laughable (I finally found someone who could actually answer real questions. His title was something like customer advocate. His response time was 2 days to 2 weeks. I used him instead of support because support just wasted my time and didn’t solve anything)

3) The tool you need is beta. Don’t use it in production. Also don’t go to production without a thing that can only be done with said tool.

4) Your cluster error collection tool has exceeded api limit (because of an erroneous alert). Your api is disabled for 24 hours. “How do I increase my limit or reset my counter”. Nobody knows. After several hours of trying, asking for help, escalating, we determined we weren’t going to fix it so we decided to roll for a day with no error reporting in prod.

5) Simple things that every customer needs are not simple (how do you add a new admin user? How do you create a load balancer?) These things are some of the most common tasks any customer would ever need to do. AWS makes them easy. If they’re not easy it was a mistake. At google these things are “working as intended, will not fix”

This was the way of internal google products as well. Watch the “broccoli man 5TB” video for an internal criticism of the culture around tooling and user support. It has been like this for years.

GCP actually had a chance a few years ago. Their networking is generations ahead of the competition. They offered a better infrastructure quality/speed to price ratio. Having just returned GCP as a customer after being away for a while I can tel you they’ve doubled down on all this crap. If anything it is worse than last time. They’ve had their chance and they’ve squandered it.

I’ve been asked to come back and fix it, but honestly I’m not saying anything people don’t already know. The thing they need most is humility and I have no idea how to bring that to a product. I know what would need to change, I just have no idea how to do that.