[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