[cagataygurturk]

Because you perceive public clouds only as virtual machine providers, that you can replace with other provider in two days. A detailed cloud migration consists of replacing some parts of your software to use managed services provided by a specific cloud provider, and AWS is still has the best service offerings IMHO. When you use these services carefully also you will see that AWS is very cheap and reliable enough. Outages like today's are happening in every platform and it is possible to mitigate them.

You can use Adwords as a self-service user. Without knowing so much of details you can run your ads but also you can bery easily ruin your budget. But many enterprise customers use it very differently than those users and they are extremely optimizing the cost. Cloud is the same. If you don't know how big customers use AWS, it is normal that you are surprised because AWS is still leading the market.

You say GCP is better than AWS. Which part is better? GCP does not have many services of AWS we benefit from. How can you compare totally different providers? You can only say AWS EC2 is worse than GCP. But you cannot compare whole platforms in one sentence.

[johansch]

(Sorry, I'm late to reply, but since you addended your comment you might still be listening...)

After spending a year evaluating both AWS and GCP (with an emphasis on their managed database services; both SQL and no-SQL) my general feeling is this:

"Microsoft Windows is to Unix as AWS is to GCP".

(Or perhaps closer to the truth: "VMS is to Unix as AWS is to GCP".)

Baically AWS services seem like they are badly designed by buerocratic mediocre engineers following some bureocratic template for "a service".

GCP feels a lot saner (both API- and UI/console-wise). I often got the feeling it's designed by people who:

a) are smart and well-rounded in terms of experiences. It does take cleverness and experience to design something elegant that is also useful.

b) take pride in their work (it does show)

(And then, as a bonus: It's cheaper!)

[cagataygurturk]

You talk about SQL and No-SQL as managed services and it shows that your experience is limited to a classical application consisting of virtual machines and some data storage. However these are not the only services offered by both platforms and currently AWS has a richer feature set. For example Lambda and its deep integration with whole AWS platform is the biggest game changer from my point of view. If we are talking about virtual machines and databases, I can accept this comparison. However we are talking about 30+ services, some of them are even not available somewhere else and solving serious business problems in production and at scale. It is very wrong to put everything into basket and compare. Maybe GCP has better pub/sub service and AWS has better object storage. These should be compared seperately. Answering to your question, why do we still stay at AWS, because it is solving our problems in the most cost effective way and with reduced complexity, we are happy with it.

[johansch]

You're probably assuming too much again :)

I specifically spent a lot of time on Lambda and found it quite annoying compared to GCP AppEngine. So much bureaucracy. Just this thing that you have to specifically register every single Lambda API call and its parameters using an interface built by non-thinking people.. Sheesh.

For on-demand processing I just want a single HTTP-ish entry point, like AppEngine provides. (That way I can I move my service between different providers, if I wanted to move away from e.g. AWS.)

[johansch]

Anyway, I just updated my HN profile with more details about my experience. Please visit it to judge if I might know what I'm talking about.

[cagataygurturk]

Sorry for endless number of typos and mistakes. Obviously I was sleepy while I was writing this.