Quoting from the article: "This accomplishment would not have been possible for our three-person team of engineers to achieve without the tools and abstractions provided by Google and App Engine."
Talking about the use case from the article, they release the puzzle at 10 and need to have infra ready to serve up all the requests. On AWS, you need to pre warm load balancers, increase the quota of your Dynamo DB, scale up instances so that they can withstand the wall of traffic, ... and then scale down after the traffic. All this takes time, people and money. Adding few other things author mentioned: Monitoring/Alerting, Local Development, Combined Access and App Logging ... will take focus from developing great apps to building out the infrastructure for apps.
Currently, I am working on projects that use both Amazon and Google clouds.
In my experience, AWS requires more planning and administration to handle the full workflow: uploading data; organisation in S3; partitioning data sets; compute loads (EMR-bound vs. Redshift-bound vs. Spark (SQL) bound); establishing and monitoring quotas; cost attribution to different internal profit centres; etc.
GCP is - in a few small ways - less fussy to deal with.
Also, GCP console - itself not very great - is much easier to use and operate than AWS console.
Could you please post the URL for the resource and the number of hits it receives? I'm interested in high load websites and I have a hard time picturing how this could lead to petabytes.
The impression I'm getting is not that GCP scales better, but it scales with less fuss - the anecdotes here all suggest that with AWS, once you hit any meaningful load (i.e. gigabytes), you need to start fiddling with stuff.
I don't know if this is actually true, I've never done any serious work in AWS.
Talking about the use case from the article, they release the puzzle at 10 and need to have infra ready to serve up all the requests. On AWS, you need to pre warm load balancers, increase the quota of your Dynamo DB, scale up instances so that they can withstand the wall of traffic, ... and then scale down after the traffic. All this takes time, people and money. Adding few other things author mentioned: Monitoring/Alerting, Local Development, Combined Access and App Logging ... will take focus from developing great apps to building out the infrastructure for apps.