[garciasn]

I use an overly simplistic way to compare how I see GCP vs AWS: MacOS vs PC.

AWS is great, has many options, is ubiquitous across verticals and is everywhere, but it lacks polish in many ways. GCP offers similar tools to that of AWS but, in many ways, feels more polished and offers tools that are integrated across the ecosystem by those who don't want to have to mess with the underpinnings of the infrastructure, roll their own, or have to buy third party services if they do not want to.

That all said, IAM on both absolutely suck. I should NOT need to read the documentation or study the systems like I do to get it up and running. Both providers seriously need to up their game here and offer sane and secure defaults that just work. The last time I dealt with AWS I wanted to pull out my hair (and this could be due to my heavy investment in GCP) and while GCP is frustrating with IAM, it wasn't nearly as arcane as I felt AWS was.

YMMV.