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> From what I gather Google cloud is technologically better, but no one wants to use a cloud from someone who doesn't do customer support as well

I have a hard time using any of google's stuff - cloud, whatever. Have had to deal with 'google search console' recently. "Give us your sitemap!". OK... "Could not fetch". The explanation for "could not fetch" might be "couldn't fetch" or "hasn't fetched yet" or "read but not processed" or "error reading" or.. anything else. On March 9, I had a sitemap entry listed as "couldn't fetch" updated to "last fetched date" of March 10 (9am UTC-4, so not even close to march 10 UTC time). It's just.... buggy. Colleagues currently moving stuff to google cloud (by edict of cto) are encountering bug after bug after slowness after flakiness. Google "support", to the extent they answer, says "we don't know".

Might it have been 'technically better' on day one? perhaps. But if it's buggy/flaky to deal with, and they have no support, not sure how you'd even verify the "technically better" part. How would you trust any numbers you see reported in their own tools?

Had to use GCP stuff about 6 years ago. It was flaky/slow and relatively unsupported then. Watching colleagues go through stuff today, in 2023, it seems no better.

I use both in my day to day work. My takes right now:

Roles/Permissions in GCP is just done better. The whole system of having to switch roles to be able to see stuff across multiple accounts in AWS is opaque and confusing. TrustPolicies are powerful but feel unnecessarily complex for almost every use case. Google has its own warts around permissioning (doing things often requires an opaque role that you have to look up, the error message is often unhelpful). However, it’s better than unraveling the series of permissions needed to, for instance, have an app pull from an S3 bucket in AWS.

AWS sucks at naming things. Everything is some nonsensical acronym that only makes sense to salespeople at Amazon. When you wonder what Google’s load balancer product is called, you look it up and it’s perhaps unsurprisingly called Elastic Load Balancer.

Another plus for Google: Having IAP as a first class citizen is a nice way to avoid having to set up bastions etc when prototyping.

On the other hand, we just spun up a Karpenter instance in EKS, and according to my colleague it’s much better than Google’s Autopilot product.

Also there is a whole industry around getting support from Google, lol. We use DoIT at my place of work, which is a company whose entire business is to pool together customer accounts for volume pricing and white glove support from Google. Interestingly, the cost savings from volume pricing are so significant there’s no cost to end users for using DoIT.

Elastic Load Balancer is in fact an AWS product. I believe GCP's equivalent is called Cloud Load Balancing.

Your point is valid and something I've felt many times as well (Route 53 means DNS somehow???), you just happened to choose literally the only AWS product that is well named.

DNS servers listen on port 53 :)

True. But if you asked me what Route 53 does I wouldn’t be able to tell you without checking. Cloud DNS, OTOH, is a pretty descriptive product name. I’m not saying you disagree, just reiterating the point that AWS naming is just a little too silly and clever for its own good ;)

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