[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?

[whoisjuan]

- Navigation: A sidebar that doesn't scale with their growing offering. Dozens of services stacked in a scrollable sidebar.

- Hierarchy: A lack of hierarchy concepts and the overall feeling that everything is scattered around. No clear defined boundaries between entities. For example, they have something called API Library, which for some weird reason, seems to be the default path to enable things that are required in specific service consoles.

Also, the way they compartmentalize things. Why is there a section in the sidebar that reads "Products" and then there are other sections at the same hierarchy level like "Compute"..aren't the services under Compute products as well?

-Discoverability: Very poor discoverability across all services. For example, go down the path of enabling one of their flagship services like Google Vision. The expected path would be something like entering the console > going to the sidebar > Finding Vision > Enabling API. Does it work like that? Nope. There's only a link to the documentation that explains how to enable it.

- Visibility: Ok. Staying with the Vision example. Now I want to see my usage of this API. It would make sense to see this data inside that console. Is it there? Nope. You have to go back and start hunting down where to find this information. Apparently they expect you to know that this lives under the API console, but there's no way to know this especially if you used the CLI or one of the "Enable Buttons" within the documentation. Maybe they thought those were useful, but they just break the learnability of the platform.

I could keep going...but you get the idea. This is not usable. I don't blame them either, to be honest. Even Google and Amazon have limited resources and the UX is a low priority for them since the value proposition is coming from other areas (security, reliability, offering range, price, etc)... but I feel as this space matures this is gonna become an area where the legacy of their poor decisions will generate issues down the road.

[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.