| As others have said, the simplicity of GCP has made it a pleasure to use. It has a great UI (material design), and the UX makes sense (the dashboard shows you a summary of your resources, resources are organized by project, notification/status icon animates when resources are changing, etc). Going back to the AWS dashboard feels clunky. There aren't a million different image types for each region and zone - simple, autoupdated base images are available for Ubuntu, CoreOS, etc. It has easy to understand base machine types and custom machine types with tailored specs can be created if needed. Product/service naming is clear (ex. Compute Engine vs EC2, Cloud Storage vs S3). Addons like one-click secure web SSH sessions and Cloud Shell are amazing, no more key pairs to worry about. Google Container Engine, with a hosted Kubernetes master, is a great concept and more transparent than closed source AWS ECS. Their on-demand per minute pricing with sustained usage discounts is almost always significantly cheaper than AWS on demand instances, and your discounts are given automatically. Try the two calculators for yourself: Google (https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/), AWS (https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html). Also, I have seen Google engineers all over HN (look at the comments on this post!) and other sites responding, commenting, and blogging - they seem actively engaged while I have seen very little from AWS. That is not to say GCP is without problems.
AWS IAM is still superior - it is easier to grant access to specific services for specific users, or have an account for a web server to upload to S3. Part of that is due to the fact that there is more plug-and-play tooling available for AWS today - boto comes to mind (boto GCP integration isn't as seamless as with AWS), as well as WAL-E.
AWS's new certificate manager with free, auto-renewed SSL certs and installation on EC2 is awesome.
S3 is cheaper than Google Cloud Storage. AWS has a longer free tier. Luckily, tools like Terraform allow us to mix and match services from each cloud. |
I disagree here. I find Google's UI to be the clunkier one. Sure, AWS is positively antique, but it's clean, readable, understandable and predictable in a homely Web 2.0 (or even 1.0) way.
Google's UI seems haphazardly put together by comparison, from the super tiny font to how common tasks are too often hidden away — the hamburger menu and the project selector being two examples. The progress of a task is also often hidden away and fairly inscrutable, such as when creating a container cluster.
When I started looking into the container support, I found that there's basically no web console for it. You can create clusters and see some summary of status about the cluster, but you can't see pods, replication controller settings, etc. — it turns out that the "Container Engine" is little more than a prebuilt Linux image with a startup shell script that starts up Kubernetes. AWS's ECS is the same way, but at least it has screens for creating jobs, adjusting resource settings and so on.
Google Cloud seems pretty great, but the web console definitely has a long way to go.