GKE is miles ahead of ECS, and being based on Kubernetes is huge. We don't really have an equivalent to Lambda (yet?) but classic App Engine isn't actually too far off 'technology-wise' (pay per use, containerized, instant start).
Our lack of IAM is beyond painful. We're sorry. We're fixing it.
PD has had snapshots since Day 1; they're differential, fast and we even encourage people to use them for super-fast "rsync"!
GKE is why I am personally switching from AWS to GCP. I'm running Kubernetes on AWS at my current gig, but I'd rather not have to build and maintain the cluster myself if I don't have to.
Haven't had a chance to try GKE, but I'll give it a whirl for my upcoming project.
With Lambda, its the whole ecosystem around it which makes it better than App Engine. A file changes in S3 and you want to do something? Lambda, in a few simple lines of code.
Google Container Engine is far ahead of AWS ECS. Google does not have a counterpart to Lambda and IAM. Block storage is far better with Google Cloud (Things like the ability to mount a drive read-only on multiple instances simultaneously make sharing data breeze. We ran into some weird race conditions related to inode pointers being modified with AWS EBS sometimes). And yes, it supports snapshots.
Even the terms wouldn't probably make sense unless you've used them. Elastic Block Storage - I surely didn't get what it was supposed to do when I read it loud the first time.
Elastic Container Service - "Why the heck is it Elastic!?" was my reaction the first time I read the term.
Our lack of IAM is beyond painful. We're sorry. We're fixing it.
PD has had snapshots since Day 1; they're differential, fast and we even encourage people to use them for super-fast "rsync"!