[sdan]

Not surprised. If AWS can't make their UI a bit more user-friendly (especially for beginners) and remove their AWS Educate for students (which by the way is horrible), I think a good chunk of developers and possible institutions might move over to GCP.

Other that UI, I think GCP in some instances may be cheaper (pretty sure I saw some instances that were cheaper... although I can't say for sure).

[whoisjuan]

Why people keep saying that GCP UI/UX is good. Is it because of Firebase? Because granted, that's a very nice UX. But when you log in to the GCP console that thing is a fucking mess. Way more complicated than AWS, with a very subpar UX...

And don't get me started with their documentation. What a piece of crap. It's like nobody thought that things of this nature require a clear hierarchy. It's just a blob of concepts organized in no meaningful way... Not saying that AWS is perfect, but at least with their documentation, you just gotta keep reading until you find what you need. With Google Cloud sometimes you hit these walls that take you out of context and the only solution is to close that tab and start again.

Ohh. And just to be fair with everyone crappiness in this space, Azure is even worse. Their console is another horrible experience.

Nobody in this industry thought about the UX of these things. They are all disastrous...

And believe me that I have studied this from multiple angles. I worked at AWS for two years trying to solve UX issues and it's just an endless battle. Developers deserve better user experiences... Nobody is thinking about this with the intensity and focus that it deserves.

[maktouch]

In GCP, I çan see all my instances of all regions in one go. I can't do that with aws.

In GCP, I can easily create networks between projects. It's really shitty to do in aws.

In GCP, I can create a machine and everyone in my team automatically has ssh access.

In GCP, I can make an instance, then mark the IP as reserved. In aws, I have to reserve the IP first.

Aws UX is the worst. I use both on an everyday basis. I could go on and on..

[whoisjuan]

It seems that you are talking about features. I never said that AWS UX isn't horrible. It is. But GCP is also pretty shitty. They don't deserve any praise in this area at all. They have useful features but that doesn't mean their UX is good.

[maktouch]

Well, UX means user experience. If some little features give you a better experience to me, a user, isn't that a better UX?

They both have regions. One makes it easier to see at a glance.

They both have the concept of reserved IP, one doesn't need to be set first.

They both install ssh keys for you. One does it per user, the other per instance.

One sets up cross region VPC for you. The other one makes you suffer and do it yourself.

[whoisjuan]

Yeah, you're right. That's definitely a better UX. But since OP was talking about GCP UI as a potential value differentiator, I was also focusing on that. Certainly something like an easy VPC setup improves the overall experience within the platform.

But I was referring to things like their documentation, the way they organize resources inside the Web Console and the confusing paths to different functionality within their UI.

[redredrobot]

Making it hard to cross regions is deliberate - I would guess it's a learning from s3 being designed as a global service. And I think if you compared global outages across cloud providers, you would see that strong region isolation has substantial benefits.

[joshuamorton]

It seems like you're confusing UI and UX. My experience with either UI is almost nil, so I can't comment, but an ugly UI that streamlines common patterns and has sane and unsurprising defaults has good UX. As far as I know, you can accomplish all of the things GP mentioned with either AWS or GCP. Its just that doing so is much less confusing on GCP, hence better UX.

[whoisjuan]

> But an ugly UI that streamlines common patterns and has sane and unsurprising defaults has good UX.

Yes. But that's not what I'm talking about (I'm a 9 to 5 designer so to keep my job I believe I need to have a strong enough foundation to not confuse UI and UX).

A product can be ugly but still functional. For example, HackerNews is kind of ugly but it has a decent UX. GCP sometimes has decent UIs with horrible UX or horrible UX with horrible UIs.

Of course, I'm speaking about web consoles. If we are going to talk about the whole developer experience (including the CLI, documentation, APIs, etc), I think it gets more complex than that. But as a user of both GCP and AWS, I think Google DX (developer experience) it's not great. Perhaps better in certain areas when compared to AWS, but not something that would deserve any praise.

[fsociety]

Perhaps there is a case once you learn AWS and GCP that they are similar in UX. But as a developer who doesn't typically deal with cloud deployments I found that setting up a GCP instance with all the security features (specifically network related) I want is significantly easier.

Maybe that isn't a good argument for a business to use GCP over AWS but it is an important point.

[rumanator]

You fail to provide any evidence or even personal anectode to support any of your assertions.

You make claims, other fellow users counter your argument with objective statements, but you ignore everything and opt to double down on more baseless assertions. That is not helpful at all.

[whoisjuan]

I mean. I don't know what you want me to say. I'm not trying to prove that AWS UX is better than GCP or vice-versa. Perhaps GCP has features like the ones mentioned above that improve the whole developer experience, but that's not what I'm arguing here. I'm just trying to elevate the argument to another level and explain why all of them have horrible UX and it's not even worth it to compare them since the bar is so low.

I don't know what type of evidence you want me to provide. It is as simple as logging in to any of these major cloud providers' web consoles and come up with your own conclusions.

[verdverm]

What is bad about the UX when you log in, in your opinion?

[dglass]

Completely agree. GCP is confusing as hell to navigate. I don't need some polished up pretty looking UI. I need to be able to access my resources quickly and move around the dashboard easily. Things are scattered everywhere in GCP.

[jon-wood]

My theory on this is that the web console isn’t actually the real UX for cloud providers - their API is the UX, and the web console is just a thing that they fling in at the end because everything is meant to have one

[always_late]

There seems to be a common problem here, is it possible for a startup to come in and improve things.

[duxup]

Anecdotal story:

I was working on a personal project where I wanted to try a "server-less" setup and I found Google's firebase authentication pretty handy and when I was looking into Firestore I found these handy videos on Youtube that Google made that I thought were pretty good introductions ... and they even updated the videos here and there so they weren't up to date. I felt like I understood how things worked pretty quickly considering I was comming from SQL land.

I had previously been playing with AWS and tied a domain to some S3 stuff and some other things and holy crap it was pure frustration and I kept thinking using AWS that "There is nothing about how this works that I could possibly have guessed correctly without googling for a painfully long time... so if / when things go wrong how would I ever know how to fix it?"

Even when I found the "right" way to do things on AWS, just the setup felt wrong it was such a "click here click there now go back to ..." adventure.

I just felt unsure and had an uneasy feeling about AWS the entire time, even after I did it right...

Google Cloud I felt like they were trying to help me understand the complexity and once I completed the task I could do it again with limited difficulty. They also were providing services tied together for me already.

[Aperocky]

Have you tried aws cli though? The whole thing is 100x easire in the command line and the documentation is 1000x better. There's even help pages you can get as you type in help. aws s3 help basically list a bunch of option to deal with s3 and you could read through and do exactly what you want. Not saying that console are useless but AFAIK all possible action through console can be a command that's (probably easier).

[duxup]

I'll check it out for sure.

The thing that bothered me was that each entity, like S3, domain hosting, everything else I did felt like an island.

Google's version felt like a "solution" in terms of things being related documentation wise and everything else.

I fully admit that given a different situation I could feel differently about Google.

[verdverm]

GCloud CLI is better in all these respects

[sdan]

Another thing that contributes to the mess of AWS UI is their docs. Probably a personal preference thing, but I don't like their cluttered UI for their docs either. Maybe if they had some developer advocates or pay websites/blogs to post about how to use all 300+ services of AWS (probably an exaggeration... but looking at their dropdown probably not) then it would be better for developers or even companies to come onboard a bit easier.

[Dunedan]

Actually I really like the AWS documentation, even more since they launched their public knowledge center [1], which offers answers for common use cases.

And AWS does have of course evangelists blogging about a lot of stuff. You should check out their blogs overview page [2] which lists 29 new posts since the beginning of October alone!

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/

[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/

[verdverm]

Amazon stuffs SEO with subpar docs, Google's are far superior. Just about every page has both CLI and web walk throughs. Many have SDK examples for multiple languages too

[dglass]

I find the GCP dashboard very confusing to navigate, and the material design does not help the information hierarchy one bit. I'd argue GCP is just as bad, if not worse, than AWS for beginners.

I'm already intimately familiar with the AWS dashboard. Just because GCP's dashboard has a bit more polish is not enough for me to switch. Even slightly lower prices may not be either.

[sdan]

Agree with the docs part. As I've explained in previous comments, can't really differentiate either AWS or GCP. But personally I'd say GCP is very slightly better; not sure exactly why, but probably due to the fact it's a bit more organized than AWS's dump that goes edge to edge with bad fonts.

[chickenpotpie]

I've always joked that the best argument for using infrastructure as code is you get to look at AWS's bad UI less

[ashelmire]

AWS isn't mentioned in the article at all... not sure why you're mentioning it. It's considered to have a similar valuation to Google Cloud though.

According to this, however, AWS seems like it should be valued considerably higher (and this is in line with my industry experience - AWS is used everywhere, Google Cloud is not): https://kinsta.com/blog/google-cloud-vs-aws/

[tpmx]

Is it really just the UI that's better designed in GCP compared to AWS? I find the "better designed" thing seems to apply to most aspects.

[sdan]

I don't really consider either having superior UI... but AWS's endless list of services when you click for the dropdown is a bit too much to handle. Not to mention how you'll have to use their search bar to get to what you want.

One thing I do credit them on is SSHing into an instance is a lot easier than GCP's "gcloud" way (I say this since I recently found the "gcloud" sdk to take over 10g on my laptop) and even if you use SSH on GCP, they make it considerably harder than AWS (although somewhat more secure for beginners... to prevent from attackers to getting to port 22).

[maktouch]

You don't need to use gcloud to ssh. Just add your keys in your projects' Metadata, and you'll have ssh access to all servers.

Each member of your team can do it, and it works retroactively.

[sdan]

Yeah that does work (which I have managed to pull off)... but I feel like it's a bit more of a pain (very slightly) to change the metadata, open up the ports and whatnot to ssh. I think AWS just tells you to download a .pem file and ssh.

In conclusion, I guess both ways aren't bad. I just seem to prefer AWS here because for me it was a bit easier than GCP because I ran into several problems when sshing to GCP initially.

[tpmx]

So it was easier for you to use AWS initially because you were used to AWS. Gotcha. ;)

[verdverm]

The entire experience is much better, can you log into a EC2 instance that has no public IP with a simple CLI command that has no IP address or ssh keys to supply?

[rstupek]

I never have any luck figuring out how to do most things in GCP. The disjointed UIs, the documentation that is out of date, etc leave me just going back to AWS.

[tpmx]

I had such a different experience when I was trying out the two platforms in parallel about fours years ago.

I came from a background where we'd created/ran all of these kinds of services in-house - simply because we started building our stuff before AWS/GCP existed in any meaningful way.

Anyway, after switching employers four years ago I had a greenfield project. I had zero investment in either platform. (I had joined a hardware company with a responsibility to build the software org. Side note: don't do that. I now understand why hardware-centric companies often can't do software - the CEO and other key people in sales/marketing simply don't understand the field at all. And that does matter. They won't even be able to understand if you're doing a good or bad job.)

My impressions were:

1) AWS had many more services than GCP

2) GCP services were generally designed better, more carefully thought out, etc. I felt that AWS APIs were designed without a very large amount of thought put into it, on an individual basis. I imagined Werner Vogels laying out edicts for a generalized service API design, and the individual teams all had to follow them, or else. And then the individual team built each service, without being able to change the general API design guidelines.

GCP services meanwhile seemed they like they were built by a smaller (and more talented) team with more team cohesion and communication. They traded a better design for a slower API/service output over time.

3) GCP was cheaper.

[tpmx]

Expanding on this:

* GCP gave me the feeling it was designed with taste, through every layer. Comparing this to the desktop platform fight; think Apple. Quality over volume.

* AWS gave me the feeling it was designed without taste. Think Microsoft. Volume over quality.

I'm talking about the combination of service design criteria, APIs, documentation, etc.

Another way of thinking about it: GCP is clearly designed by hackers schooled in the ways of UNIX over a very long time. Simplicity and elegance is valued very highly in terms of designs. For AWS: Simplicity is clearly not a design goal.

[rstupek]

I've tried to use several different gcp services. I am forced to use their UI for setting up google play services and the documentation never matches the UI. Their pubsub services, when I tried to use them had broken documentation. It just feels cobbled together everytime I dip back into it.

[workthrowaway]

this. pretty UI but disjointed documentation. it's quite up to date (for what i do though) but it's hard to get the whole picture.

[ifthenelseend]

UI is not that bad, but the product is very complicated for startups. For example, I can create a website on Azure with just a few clicks as a single item in my account. On AWS, (even if I use Beanstalk) I have to create VPC, load balancer, security groups, S3 bucket for code and a lot of other things... not easy to manage and takes a lot of time!

[mrfredward]

Setting things up in AWS is time consuming, but not as time consuming as debugging.The AWS documentation is huge and seems thorough, and yet never actually helps me solve any problems. There is always some obscure bit of configuration not covered in the tutorials and buried too deep in the docs to find that is needed to get anything past a hello world to work. Meanwhile, the errors in the log are too vague to make the solution googleable, and it takes days to figure out even the simplest things.

I've found the only way to make anything work in AWS is to search for hours and hours looking for the Stack Overflow question that tells you what the docs left out. And yet I stick with AWS because last time I tried Azure everything was broken. It'll be nice when this stuff gets a little more polished.

[atwebb]

When was the last time you tried Azure?