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by kharms 2742 days ago
For someone who has worked with both: which offers a better developer onboarding experience, for small web/data apps? Ease of learning and use wise.
6 comments

There are many dimensions in which working with GCP is a lot better for small and medium apps, if only the proximity to Firebase.

These results are, to my mind, quite questionable. They certainly don't line up with my personal experience and the measurements I've done in the last year.

AWS is much harder to use correctly right now, to me.

I prefer aws to google and msft for account mgmt purposes. google and msft are so dead set on binding your logins to your global accounts which might be used for other things.

I know someone might argue that aws and amazon.com are sharing the same account, I guess they "can" but its easy to make a new aws account with just an email - I think we manage about 12-15 different aws accounts. We tend to isolate major clients or projects by making entirely new accounts. I don't feel like I'm working uphill to keep multiple aws accounts from merging or somehow binding to my personal shopping account for amazon.com. With msft and google it feels like I am always almost "tricked" in to binding multiple accounts and login states together.

I would argue that once you have an account up and running most of these guys are similar with differences. The ui on aws isn't glamorous but I find its utilitarian simplicity pretty easy to deal with and get most things done.

On the note of account management, you cannot be a Google Cloud Partner without GSuite or Google Cloud Identity accounts, period, end of story. This whole setup is just ludicrous, I have to pay Google money just to have a partner login? Even Microsoft offers a "good enough" tier of Azure AD that can be used to sign up for their partner portal, and AWS just uses normal Amazon accounts.
That seems to be dependent on whether you're working on your own personal/company accounts or on behalf of other clients.

For owned accounts, I prefer GCP and Azure because the logins are seamlessly integrated into GSuite and Office 365 so we can manage IAM on an individual basis in one place.

It depends on your goals. If you're planning on just setting up a couple of servers then it's all much the same. However for scaling and maintenance I prefer AWS with a tool like Terraform to manage infrastructure. It forces you to think of situations like replacing servers, as you'll have to replace them at some point.

I think Google's AppEngine is easier for starting, but AWS Lambda + API Gateway is pretty close IMO.

Is there anything that would preclude you from using the GCP provider in terraform?

In my experience, most folks choose GCP for the Kubernetes offerings which is vastly superior in terms of scaling and maintenance than EKS. Specifically, there are actually upgrades that actually work. There's also autoscaling nodepools which work pretty well.

I think Google does much better in terms of UX / DevX. Particular features that I appreciate are the cloud console shell and their API explorer/fiddler. Still, they do not have as many services, and the services they have do not have the same features so actually getting things done may still be easier on AWS.
If you have no experience with cloud providers and are set on one of the two: Google. UI/UX and documentation are so much better. Also I can't really agree with the articles findings, maybe my personal benchmarks are too specific to my workload.
I’ve had much better experience with docs on aws than Google. And prefer the ux of aws.
I've also had a way better experience with AWS's docs and UX.
Honestly, for that kind of workload I'd adjust my sights to Digital Ocean or Firebase.