| These are personal opinions, based on the project I outlined (and not what I work on now, necessarily!). Technically: - Google has the most reliable network, compute and storage (for a given size). - AWS has the only comprehensible security model for identity, although it's still not complete (e.g. I can't grant a role assigned to an instance profile permission to `DescribeInstances` for itself only). I strongly believe IAM is the crown jewel of AWS, - but wish it would be completed to it's own potential. - Google has the best "organisations" structure overall, though AWS Organisations is vastly improved over what it used to be. - Azure's model for network peering between networks in different tenants is complete crazy town and will certainly result in outages when a customer disables the service account required to maintain it. - Provisioning times in Azure are wildly variable - provisioning a VM with the same image in the same zone often had minutes of difference between fastest and slowest. The other two are much more consistent. - The Terraform provider for Google is missing many data sources, and almost every type of resource we used needed patching in some important way. - We had to build "surrogate" Packer builders for Google and Azure to make automation of scratch-build ZFS-on-root Ubuntu images with our platform customisations. I built the AWS version of that builder originally, so that was not much of a surprise. From a support perspective: - AWS and Azure were very willing to work with us in getting our service up and running even though we weren't spending a huge amount in the development phase, and it was easy to get in touch with someone to explain what we were doing and request advice. - It was impossible to speak to a human at Google. Experiencing the kafkaesque automated account policies (e.g. "you can have enough cores to actually bring up a database cluster when you pay your invoice but we haven't issued an invoice yet because your account isn't a month old, and no despite being a company with a multi-year trading history you can't just put money on deposit to prove trustworthiness") actually prompted me to move my personal accounts off GSuite in case a problem ever arose. Sadly the technical excellence of GCP in several important areas did not (for me) make up for the fact that they are impossible to work as a small business doing something that is not strictly happy path. |