I'm really glad they took the opportunity to change the APIs and abstractions around. Some of the ones exposed by AWS are absolutely insane.
Not to mention some of the paradigms: regionalized dashboards/endpoints, the mess that is EC2Classic/VPC, lack of projects for compartmentalization/namespacing ... a lot of those APIs also leak internal implementation details of their products, and trying to match them would be silly.
And they did follow one API that everybody else has: S3. And that one is decent only because it's basically HTTP with some auth headers sprinkled in.
My overall experience with GCloud is much better thanks to these redesigns. AWS just seems like an underdesigned mess of loosely coupled components implemented by siloed teams.
> AWS just seems like an underdesigned mess of loosely coupled components implemented by siloed teams
That was my experience as well. It felt like they never included any UX person throughout any of the decisions. Their naming convention alone always seemed confusing to me, although it does seem to be improving.
If there's margin to be had, the first step is having customers.
AWS was the clear leader, and sure, you can try to attract different customers... but they should have also tried to make it as easy as possible for existing AWS customers to migrate.
Then, you offer your customers additional services that the other guy doesn't offer.
Your question is basically how does hosting a quarter of the internet make money, well Amazon benefits a mil+ an hour in profit off AWS margins... plenty to entice Google and Microsoft to compete.
Not to mention some of the paradigms: regionalized dashboards/endpoints, the mess that is EC2Classic/VPC, lack of projects for compartmentalization/namespacing ... a lot of those APIs also leak internal implementation details of their products, and trying to match them would be silly.
And they did follow one API that everybody else has: S3. And that one is decent only because it's basically HTTP with some auth headers sprinkled in.
My overall experience with GCloud is much better thanks to these redesigns. AWS just seems like an underdesigned mess of loosely coupled components implemented by siloed teams.