I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

My two cents, GCP has a few excellent gems which are better than pretty much any competing cloud offering:<p>- Cloud Run. Best way to deploy containers hands down. All of the benefits of a serverless&#x2F;containerized workload with all the ease of a traditional VPS deployment. Extremely cheap (pay $0 for side projects with little traffic).<p>- BigQuery. Very easy to use with immense power without having to deal with the details yourself. Billing can be either extremely cheap or rather expensive depending on what you&#x27;re doing, though.<p>- GCS Archive Storage. 1&#x2F;3 the cost of glacier for storage ($0.0012&#x2F;GB&#x2F;Month lol), but more for retrieval. Has none of the annoyances of Glacier (you can download your files instantly, upload using normal APIs). Perfect for extremely cheap backups.<p>- Cloud Spanner. I&#x27;ve not had a reason to use this yet myself, but there really aren&#x27;t any comparable offerings that I know of.

We use GCP at my current company and I&#x27;ve used AWS a lot in the past.<p>Managing IAM users and roles on GCP is much more pleasant than AWS, and if you happen to use Google Workspace for you org, it approaches (as an infra engineer) the sublime.<p>GCP projects are a really intuitive way to isolate resources that you don&#x27;t want to be able to talk to each other by default.<p>GKE has been very reliable.<p>BigQuery got expensive faster than I was expecting, but it works and integrates well with GCP IAM and makes managing access to datasets easy.<p>On the less positive side, support is lackluster, and GA doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean what you want it to mean.<p>Edit: Almost forgot! Again, if you use Google Workspace, then IAP is fantastic.

I share the same experience and opinion. I cannot imagine what a significant argument would be to use AWS instead of GCP that outweighs the benefits and the seemingly integrated services. GCP has so far covered 99% of my use cases, and I can testify that I have a lot of advanced cases linked to data management, information security, networking and more. I am open and do not judge AWS, and perhaps its also a matter of what you are used to. However my style and approach to problems is more in alignment with GCP. I am for example of the opinion that the cloud provider should take care of everything linked to infrastructure, maintenance and as well scaling. And all of that should be as simple as possible. There is no need to overcomplicate. In this way I can focus on what makes my product unique, rather than spending my time on over-engineering repetitive features with zero value added.

My biggest challenge with GCP is that I&#x27;m still not convinced Google cares <i>that</i> much about this division.<p>They acquired Looker, fired the customer service staff, and then set it out to crumble. Looker used to be LOVED by its customers but now they were forced to make their semantic layer work with Tableau.<p>Also, I&#x27;m still not convinced Google cares about divisions that aren&#x27;t linked to advertising. Google Search, Gmail (kinda), Maps, Android, and YouTube are their darlings.<p>Will GCP be around in 5 years? I <i>honestly</i> am not sure.

I use both. GCP sucks, AWS rocks.<p>GCP is <i>theoretically</i> superior because it has more features and integrations built in. But in practice it&#x27;s a big mess, and if you want to do anything the &quot;not GCP way&quot;, you&#x27;re better off just not using it at all. People talk about GCP &quot;getting X right&quot;, which might be true, except to actually <i>use</i> the thing that they &quot;got right&quot; you have to use everything <i>else</i> they have, and good luck figuring out how to do that with their insanely bad&#x2F;missing docs. Let&#x27;s not even get into how they overload the same concept in multiple places, have tons of arbitrary limitations of naming conventions for different components, navigating the console is a pain (and again arbitrarily limiting), and services are weirdly implemented so the SDK is inconsistent. They tried really hard to pretend they had some unified, Enterprise-ready, perfect system&#x2F;design, and of course failed at implementation, because perfect systems don&#x27;t exist. Their support is crap and their services are down a lot, and very slow to orchestrate.<p>AWS is less feature-filled by default, but everything that is there works, isn&#x27;t complicated, can be used a-la-carte, and docs are easy to find. Support is insanely reliable. They take a one-useful-piece-at-a-time approach rather than making you use the kitchen sink, and it&#x27;s not hard to get things working (well, not any harder than for any other cloud provider). Pretty much everything they do is simpler and more reliable.

I think YRMV depending on what you&#x27;re trying to do, but I think the DX &amp; web console experience is much more pleasant on GCP.<p>On GCP, their services are cleanly organized and have distinct icons that tell me what it does with minimal reading. On AWS, often I&#x27;m left scratching my head (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;awsiconquiz.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;awsiconquiz.com&#x2F;</a>)<p>The web console design on AWS is catching up (for a long time the UI just looked like an offshoot of the e-commerce site design and wasn&#x27;t very clean) to GCP, but occasionally you still find elements of the old AWS console design.<p>Often, it seems like AWS has more leaky abstractions that require you to be more aware of all the other connecting components of their infra services.<p>For example, trying running managed Airflow on AWS&#x2F;GCP. Both services require some VPC &amp; storage infra setup to get your Airflow container services running. On GCP, you can spin up Cloud Composer without specifying your VPC or storage bucket details and they&#x27;ll default them for you.<p>AWS however, you&#x27;ll need to have your VPC&#x2F;S3 already setup ahead and if you&#x27;ve not configured your private&#x2F;public subnets or S3 IAM policy, you can put your Airflow environment into a non-workable state.<p>Overall, I think GCP has some advantages of not being saddled with legacy baggage that AWS has with making sure their services are interoperable.

Google recently killed an important firebase feature around cross platform in-app links, not raise prices, no KILL IT. It’s a feature depended on by tons and tons of customers, that was a far bigger shock for me than google domains, atleast domain infra is designed with migration in mind usually (dns not included) But google killing of a vital feature[1] of firebase (with no google alternative provided) made me shit scared on if I should integrate with more of their products. They also randomly jacked up prices of sms authentication exponentially in a day without any major notice and caused a ton of people to get thousands of dollars in bill increase suddenly [2]. Staying away from google is a good idea unless playing russian roulette at work is your hobby. Every product there, is one manager’s ambition for promotion away from being killed and re-invented<p>- [1] (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;dynamic-links" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;dynamic-links</a>)<p>- [2] (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Firebase&#x2F;comments&#x2F;14cj7au&#x2F;firebase_new_sms_auth_costs&#x2F;jus8hzp&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Firebase&#x2F;comments&#x2F;14cj7au&#x2F;firebase_...</a>)

To everyone saying GCP will be gone - it generates over $8 billion in revenue per year and $400 million in profit. There&#x27;s no chance they kill it any time soon.<p>Yes it posted heavy losses in the past, but any major infrastructure does, and obviously there is a major amount of potential - and they have around 10% of the total cloud market share, not insignificant by any means.

I find the GCP documentation to be lacking compared to AWS. Specifically while using GCP with Terraform I hit more frustrating nonsense error messages with little to no google hits or undocumented behavior around IAM config compared to my experience doing similar things on AWS.

We unfortunately have three vendors (AWS, GCP, Azure) at my company because of acquisitions and the cost involved to consolidate.<p>I am part of the central team that manages the provisioning users and accounts and billing.<p>AWS is miles ahead of how we can express what we want in accounting.<p>AWS reps are much much more knowledgeable and a pleasure to work with when it comes to billing.

I don&#x27;t buy the article&#x27;s argument around the &quot;Fear that GCP may be abandoned by Google&quot;. Yes, it is highly unlikely that Google will wake-up one day and announce a deprecation day for GCP, like they did with dozens of other products. What is not unlikely though is that they under-invest in it compared to AWS, and being a 2nd or 3rd player, they would fall behind in products and&#x2F;or reliability, unable to compete on price or features due to better economies of scale of the competitors.<p>Before Google kills products, they lose interest in them.

Technology isn&#x27;t a weakness with Google... never was. Most of their stuff is top-notch technology-wise. The problems are from a business-angle and being their customer.<p>Meaning, even if you&#x27;re a F500 company you are an insignificant gnat on the windshield of the gigantic G-machine that makes its money elsewhere.<p>Now, I don&#x27;t believe think they&#x27;d actually shut GCP down. Cloud is just too damn strategic in a post Y2k world.<p>Complain about Amazon if you wish, and there are many reasons to. They are not as tech-oriented and the task-master culture of Bezos is well-known by now. But at the very least they are sales and customer focused, and retail and cloud is where they make their money. So incentives are better aligned with them. Even if their customer service is not amazing, the fact that it actually exists is a large factor in their favor.

With even a medium level investment in AWS, I can get actual human people from Amazon on my company Slack on a channel and I can talk to them directly. I can get them to fly to our office to train people or workshop on how to use the resources more effectively.<p>On GCP I get some AI bot that doesn&#x27;t answer anything and if I anger it by accident, my account and my business is gone. Then my only option is getting on the HN front page to get some help.

i’ve built bespoke automation at the api level for azure, gcp, and aws.<p>using azure makes you want to watch the world burn.<p>using gcp makes you want to give alcoholism a fair try.<p>using aws makes you wonder why we can’t have nice things.<p>ime those who prefer gcp tend to use a web interface. those who don’t have a preference tend to use iac. you want to work directly with the api, for innumerable reasons.<p>aws is the canonical example of use boring tech. nobody cares which database you use, not even a little. if you’re talking about your stack choices, your product likely has negative value.<p>of all the projects i pull into my rss reader, github commits on the aws-go-sdk-v1 are the most consistent and unsurprising. ive been following aws api and service changes since boto1.<p>there’s a lot i wish was different about aws, but nothing that’s urgent.<p>someday we’ll get better providers. it won’t be azure or gcp. it will be a new player.<p>by 2030 i’d expect to see someone disrupting aws by offering api compatible clones of the core services without egress fees. r53, dynamo, ec2, ec2 spot, lambda, s3, apigateway, sqs.

GCP has some nice things but AWS is simply more reliable.<p>The GCP outage [1] in April is a great example. A fire in europe-west9-a &quot;zone&quot; took down the entire europe-west9 &quot;region&quot; (because this entire &quot;region&quot; is actually housed in a single datacenter), which then caused a global GCP console&#x2F;API outage because GCP&#x27;s single global control plane couldn&#x27;t reach europe-west9.<p>The fact that a zonal issue escalated to a regional and then global outage shows that GCP is not serious about limiting blast radius and all their talk of independent regional&#x2F;zonal infrastructure is marketing fluff.<p>In comparison, AWS AZs can be up to 60 miles apart, share no physical infrastructure, and every region hosts its own API&#x2F;console&#x2F;control plane.<p>Also, Nitro. AWS has essentially eliminated the performance overhead of virtualization with Nitro, and years later GCP still has no equivalent so GCP customers still have to pay for that overhead.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.cloud.google.com&#x2F;incidents&#x2F;dS9ps52MUnxQfyDGPfkY" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.cloud.google.com&#x2F;incidents&#x2F;dS9ps52MUnxQfyDGPf...</a>

My view is that there are areas where GCP is better and areas where AWS is better. AWS has a much bigger community, and better business continuity story. GCP has a better developer experience and more uniquely-amazing best-in-class products (e.g. Spanner, Cloud Run, BigQuery). In the end, I don&#x27;t believe Google will shut down GCP.<p>At Coherence (withcoherence.com) - I&#x27;m a cofounder - we deliver a developer platform that lets use use either cloud in a developer-friendly way. It also gives you some protection against lock-in to either cloud.

Related:<p><i>Many ways where GCP excels over AWS</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23124350">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23124350</a> - May 2020 (39 comments)

Perhaps from a technology standpoint (debateable).<p>But from the perspective of a CEO, we want<p>1. Talent hiring should be easy, so we can plan growth<p>2. There should be a good self service support for developers<p>3. Need good sales support in architecture and tech selection (when needed)<p>4. Need to be able to get through to support engineer in 5 mins or less (we use aws premium support)<p>5. Need single vendor (as much as possible).<p>We consume a lot if what aws has to offer - we use their workspaces, mac cloud, device farm, code commit etc<p>We did a proper shoot out. While aws has its idiosyncrasies- it’s light years ahead of Google and Microsoft<p>Ps. We use Gsuite (for the last decade) - teaching a live human used to a challenge - now it’s a major pain.<p>If we find a better alternative to Gmail, Gdocs (etc). I’d switch in a heartbeat.

GCP will shutdown your production servers and take one whole week to get it back. All for missing out on a KYC form.<p>Our story: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35133917">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35133917</a><p>Forget about the initial shutdown, how can you take 1 whole week to resolve something critical like this.<p>Even if Google is offering me $1mil cloud credits today I wouldn&#x27;t risk my business with them anymore.

In my opinion all of GCPs advantages are eliminated by the fact that it is a Google product and I wouldn’t want to trust my business&#x2F;livelihood to google. And this is not just an opinion I share, it’s the opinion of the large company I work for

We still use AWS but it&#x27;s been a couple years since I&#x27;ve really needed to dig into it because we have very competent people who&#x27;se job that is now.<p>My memories of having to find the right form, paste the right ID of the right server&#x2F;bucket&#x2F;lambda into are pretty traumatic. A TON of guesswork. Lot of what felt like duct taping things together.<p>If you don&#x27;t have a full mental model of how everything works, they&#x27;re certainly not going to help you get one without reading documentation. Their documentation is for the most part top tier, but the UX makes it more important than it arguably should be.<p>There&#x27;s a difference between not handholding and just being obtuse, and I feel like so much of AWS&#x27;s UI&#x2F;general design philosophy falls into the latter camp.

One fundamental difference between GCP and AWS is that AWS puts zones in different buildings in the same, well, &quot;region,&quot; whereas GCP just isolated them in the same building.<p>Not the end of the world, but you shouldn&#x27;t assume that by deploying things regionally with GCP you will be protected against, idk, a fire or water issue that has building-wide impact.

I did a shootout of a number of cloud visual recognition APIs. All of them took less then 20 minutes to have a demo running except for GCP which rudely required me to install special software to log in which trashed the Python installation on my machine and overall took an order of magnitude more time than all the others... No thanks.

A lot of people (understandably) complain about longevity of various Google products. One thing that&#x27;s nice about their overall cloud strategy is their focus on interoperability.<p>As the incumbents, AWS and Azure strive for lock-in. As the relative upstart, GCP aims to grease the wheels of switching to their platform. To that end, they&#x27;ve pioneered technologies like Kubernetes and the golang CDK to enable people implement their services in a vendor-agnostic way so they can easily switch around. GCP encourages that, which is nice, especially in the worst cases.

non-slimey link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nandovillalba.scribe.rip&#x2F;why-i-think-gcp-is-better-than-aws-ea78f9975bda" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nandovillalba.scribe.rip&#x2F;why-i-think-gcp-is-better-t...</a><p>and, as an AWS-er having to now support GCP, I <i>violently and emphatically</i> disagree with this:<p>&gt; The experience of GCP on the other hand is more like collecting the car keys and driving off from the parking lot, with the option of dismantling and customising the car if you wish, but the default is a fully built functioning car with cohesive parts so you can quickly achieve your objectives, which is driving around, not assemble the car.<p>Oh, really? I invite the GCP newcomer to click on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;console.cloud.google.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;console.cloud.google.com&#x2F;</a> create a new Project, and then run $(gcloud functions list) or, as the sibling comment pointed out, $(gcloud run jobs list) and watch it cheerfully tell you that you must <i>turn on</i> those services for each and every Project. And not just cloudfunctions.googleapis.com or run.googleapis.com, it&#x27;s for damn near everything a sane person would want to use cloud computing for<p>I reiterate: you cannot turn on those APIs for your GCP &quot;account,&quot; you must do it for each and every Project you create<p>Oh, you&#x27;re the Super Admin for your Google account? Well, be sure you grant yourself the resourcemanager.projectCreator Role because as <i>super admin</i> you don&#x27;t automatically have it<p>A reasonable person may retort that these are &quot;secure by design&quot; by opt-ing-in to surface area and permissions that one wishes to have, but as compared to &quot;create AWS Account, start using ELB like it ain&#x27;t no thing and I have AdministratorAccess granting me * permissions&quot; -- let&#x27;s not start talking about collecting car keys and driving off the lot

I would be very afraid of automatic blocking of our entire infrastructure if some developer gets his Google account banned. No one (human) to provide support either, just automated responses.<p>Then the risk of some product being discontinued on Google is very real. The article just sidesteps it in the most unsatisfactory way, with a pinky promise that it won&#x27;t happen.<p>So the technology itself is not bad, but Google&#x27;s customer management is so terrible that I would never risk a company&#x27;s life on it.

I don´t want to hate on the opinion of people, but &quot;X is better then Y&quot; is a pretty useless type of article.<p>I have used AWS, GCP and Azure + some more that offer AWS style of services. In the end the question is &quot;what is best for my organisation?&quot; It really really really does not matter if a developer finds GCP more easy to use or if AWS is way better at feature X.<p>The service has to fit the requirements.<p>And even worse, sometimes the requirements do not care for usability, cost or features.

While I never spent a lot of time in GCP, it seemed like it was harder to understand GCP itself as a platform compared to AWS.<p>That is to say that Google APIs and services seem fine, but figuring out project management and infrastructure management feel incredibly weird. Not necessarily bad, but arcane and awkward where in AWS I can just hit the ground running.<p>Arguably, debatably, GCP might have the &quot;more correct&quot; model with resources scoped to projects and such, but it does make the learning curve harder.

To me, GCP does seem easier to use, but I&#x27;ve recently had some instances where I had externally-hosted services (Zaps) make calls to my cloud functions there and inexplicably fail, with no logs whatsoever. While I was trying to figure out what went wrong, I found some other people online who said that their Google rep had mentioned &quot;service instability&quot; or something of the sort to them. Thinking that must&#x27;ve been the case, I went to reach out to GCP support (as nothing was mentioned on their outages page), only to find that it costs $30 &#x2F; month to get help with anything other than issues with billing (and their pricing page threatens to ban you from support access entirely if you are caught buying it and canceling it after use).

Does anyone have recent experience with both? I&#x27;m in the market, for a startup, and I need to decide. My priorities are the data warehouse (BigQuery vs. Redshift) and ML (Vertex AI vs. SageMaker).<p>This article is three years old. Vertex did not even exist then.

AWS: there is a specific option to fix your specific problem, but it&#x27;s buried in a menu with 258 choices in<p><pre><code> CamelCaseButWhichOne? </code></pre> GCP:<p><pre><code> gcloud --butwhichone --orIsitThisOne --No-Dammit-Its-In-YAML=.&#x2F;yaml-file</code></pre>

As much as I don’t like using a Google product, I have to admit GCP is wonderful. I really think GCP is the best UX Google has to offer. My favorite feature is that whatever you do on the web console, GCP will show you the equivalent gcloud CLI command. It can also give you the Terraform plan for some already created resources (maybe it’s even everywhere? Not sure)<p>The configuration and naming of the services is also wayyy more sane than AWS overall, you actually know what they do from the name only most of the time.

I personally enjoy GCP much more because it&#x27;s easier. You can do almost everything from the UI and products are named the way you expect them to be named (except for a few exceptions).<p>When you are doing devops on the side not as your main job, it&#x27;s really a game changer compared to the cryptic AWS UI. The only part lacking imo is the log&#x2F;monitoring which is definitely subpar, just logging proper json is a mess.

I mean, the author makes the arbitrary decision to equate AWS accounts with GCP projects, and then from there determines that this is unsatisfactory. This is not my experience at all, and it wasn&#x27;t until I joined a Fortune 500 company that I ever came across the idea of separate accounts - and they were split along corporate accounting divisions.

They shut down Google Cloud IoT Core. Y’know, the thing you need to update all of your field devices to be aware of?

Tell me what your company’s existing IAM strategy is and I’ll tell you what cloud you should go all in on.

Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.medium.com&#x2F;dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.medium.com&#x2F;dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...</a>

What are people&#x27;s thoughts on DigitalOcean compared to AWS and&#x2F;or GCP?

GCP allows editing memory and CPU on VMs, which is super handy.

Unfortunately it&#x27;s all for nothing when your account is randomly deactivated for a TOS violation that can&#x27;t be precisely named

GCP has much better UI than AWS. GCP is easy and fun to use, while AWS looks like fighting 90s Windows 3.11 app<p>(No comments on the poor behaviour towrds customers by both and Azure as well)<p>Edit: And after fully reading the article, I agree with the author. Yes, GCP is very easy to use compared to the monster AWS is. Its Googles poor reputation, esp amongst the HN types, that I suspect is the reason not many people use it

Is there any good data comparing cloud provider uptimes? I know GCP had an outage recently that impacted me.

The only real reason is GCP has a central US region.<p>How AWS is still stuck at the coasts is beyond me.

How GCP support compares to AWS support? What is your personal experience with support?

Their kms offering is cheaper and that alway free tier for a small vm still helps.

&gt; GCP has done well integrating their different services together. GCP provides a smaller set of core primitives that are global and work well for lots of use cases. Pub&#x2F;Sub is probably the best example I have for this. GCP has Pub&#x2F;Sub. Pub&#x2F;Sub seems flexible enough to replace most (all?) of AWS’ various queues.<p>I feel like if you&#x27;re going to spend this much time writing something in this much detail, the least you can do is try to understand some of the things you&#x27;re criticizing and not say things so wildly incorrect.<p>&gt; In AWS you have SQS, SNS, Amazon MQ, Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, DynamoDB Streams, and maybe another queueing service by the time you read this post.<p>The most accurate criticism would be that Pub&#x2F;Sub combines AWS&#x27;s SQS and SNS. AWS had SQS first for 1-to-1 async queuing integrations. Then they added SNS for fan-out. GCP just started with fan-out from the start and said &quot;well if you don&#x27;t want to fan out, and just have one subscription, it&#x27;s basically fine.<p>That&#x27;s actually also true with AWS too - nobody is stopping you from using SNS this way. SQS was the first AWS service (S3 went &quot;GA&quot; first, though), and AWS doesn&#x27;t deprecate things that are popular with customers.<p>Amazon MQ is Amazon&#x27;s managed Apache MQ. You can criticize Amazon for hosting managed open source software, but there is a reason why it exists for customers that want to use an industry standard queueing service but not worry about operating it.<p>GCP&#x27;s competitor to Kinesis isn&#x27;t Pub&#x2F;Sub, it&#x27;s Dataflow -&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;dataflow" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;dataflow</a> Both are described as for the same use case - streaming, analytics, batch processing.<p>Kinesis Data Firehose may be another valid criticism. It can be thought of a &quot;Simplified Kinesis that can push data instead of pulling it&quot;. It is clearly coupled tightly with Kinesis Data Streams itself, so in another company that cared less about not breaking backwards compatibility maybe they would&#x27;ve bolted those features on top of Kinesis.<p>DynamoDB Streams is also not a separate service. It&#x27;s a feature of DynamoDB - streams data capture streams from a database. Exactly like... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;bigtable&#x2F;docs&#x2F;change-streams-overview" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;bigtable&#x2F;docs&#x2F;change-streams-overvi...</a><p>&gt; 2019 Update: Amazon has now released another streaming service: Amazon Managed Streaming Kafka.<p>GCP also has a Managed Kafka service only theirs is a collaboration with Confluent: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;learn&#x2F;what-is-apache-kafka" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;learn&#x2F;what-is-apache-kafka</a><p>&quot;Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud provides fully managed Apache Kafka as a service so you can focus on building apps and not managing clusters.&quot;

GCP lost me when I had to enable API errors from the console in order to see actual error in the console rather than a user hostile “Something went wrong” type message.<p>There is probably a rational reason for this behavior, but I don’t care. Just tell me the error.

BigQuery is probably the strongest aspect

I&#x27;ll continue beating the dead horse: I don&#x27;t trust Google.<p>At best GCP is slightly better than AWS (debatable), which is not enough to offset the risk because of how much of a pain it is to switch cloud providers.<p>Even if GCP shutting down is one in a million, aws shutting down is 1 in ten million.<p>Also, I keep getting the feeling that Google keeps trying to automate their customer service through bots. I have use quite a few google services from youtube, to google workspaces (a paid service) - I have never talked to a Google representative. I have talked to AWS service reps multiple times, I have talked to Amazon reps multiple times. Amazon as a company has real people you can talk to.<p>I don&#x27;t trust google to not shut down my gcp account because my gmail was connected to some project where I accidentally sent a bunch of spam emails to a test account. And if that did I happen, I feel like I would just get an automated message and a bunch of hoops to jump through before I could talk to a real person.

would GCP (or AWS for that matter) survive on their own? What does the relation with the parent company provide and what does it demand in return?<p>From a business model perspective both these two entities are an aberration in how far they are from their corporate umbrella.<p>Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc are more natural players in this domain but DigitalOcean shows you don&#x27;t need to be bigtech to carve a niche.

All of the smack talk about AWS rings true in my experience. The documentation is terrible and incomplete.<p>That said… there&#x27;s one MASSIVE reason I trust AWS over GCP.<p>Google has a knack for killing products&#x2F;services. Even when they seem to be popular. You don&#x27;t know if a service will exist next week. But you took the time to invest in the ecosystem and get to know the offering…<p>But Google does what Google does, and off to the pile it goes.

a.k.a. Freedom of thought. Warning: extremely large wall of text waiting for you.<p>On a more serious note: I, and most of the business I work for, value stability over hype. Skip to the almost last paragraph &quot;Fear that GCP may be abandoned by Google&quot;, if that is of interest to you :)

Ah, the time has come for me to do another rant about Amazon<p>- Open amazon app on your phone<p>- Type in “craftsman firepit spark screen” into search and get results<p>- Is the top result a craftsman product? No. Why? Who knows. But it’s ok, it’s like the third one down, though this is already hinting on the things to come.<p>- Open up product details for the Craftsman one. It’s called, and make a mental note here “CRAFTSMAN 19.5 Spark Screen for Smokeless Fire Pit Stainless Steel Mesh Lid Outdoor Fire Safety for Backyard Bonfires“.<p>- Oh no, it’s not quite the right size for the model I have. But there’s a helpful link to “Visit the Craftsman Store” at the top, which is I suppose a little section of Amazon that is all things Craftsman. Let’s click it to find the right size model.<p>- It takes me to a page with a nice big Craftsman Logo and a search bar inviting me “Search all Craftsman”.<p>- I enter “spark screen”. That’s the name of the product from the listing after all.<p>- I get 5 results. They are: screwdriver socket, 46 inch lawnmower blades, screwdriver set, pressure washer, and an electric lawnmover.<p>- The end.<p>This is the company on the forefront of machine learning.<p>PS: As a bonus story - I was recently trying to find “Wonderpets” cartoon for my daughter, using Amazon Prime Video apple tv app - and not quite remembering the name, I typed in “wonder pets” into the search box, and as you might have guessed, the cartoon I was searching for wasn’t in the results.<p>Makes you wonder how many more resources of time, money and people does Amazon need so that my simple interactions with their consumer products are not such a subpar experience.

A few years ago I worked at a company that lacked any form of CI&#x2F;DF. I set up TeamCity in a few hours and it was up and running, but it did not see much adoption.<p>Then they had a super long internal project on how to improve their development processes.<p>The code base was more than 90% .Net code on the back end.<p>The company decided they wanted to avoid vendor lock and thus, they would not use Azure, and decided that AWS was the best candidate.<p>My team was assigned to configure and set up the CI&#x2F;CD pipeline. After quite a lot of time, months, we had to admit that we had failed.<p>The company hired an AWS expert who didn&#x27;t get much done. That person was soon gone.<p>At least a quarter has passed since it began.<p>The company hired 2 &quot;elite&quot;, &quot;top of the line&quot; AWS experts. They got it done, but it took them well over a month.<p>Afterwards it mostly worked. I dont want to know the total cost but it was enormous.<p>Since they were a Microsoft shop, going with Azure would have saved them a s*load of money, as well as time.<p>Since Azure integrates pretty with Visual Studio configurations and solutions we would have it done in less than a month without external help.<p>I set it up at a different shop and I spent a lot less than a month.<p>I can&#x27;t make a judgement that Azure is technically better, perhaps when it gets up and running it is a superior solution, but for a .Net shop I would choose Azure again the next time around.

See Google&#x2F;Alphabet&#x27;s latest quarterly earnings.<p>There&#x27;s a decent chance that in a few years GCP will be no more.<p>I had an argument with one of the biggest investors in Google a few years ago, in which I was predicting exactly this scenario. He didn&#x27;t believe me.<p>Perhaps I was right after all.<p>GCP lost a ton of money since its inception. Its leadership is so far away from being able to run this business properly, that I would never recommend anyone to put all their eggs on GCP.<p>Plus, as your company scales, you should REDUCE, not increase, your cloud usage, in favor of a properly optimized on-prem.<p>Well, just my 0.02. What do I know, right?