As someone that works solely in a GCP environment for work, I couldn't agree more. GCP products do "just work", but if I had to nitpick, it's that some of their services don't have complete terraform modules (looking at you IAP), but outside of that, their pricing is reasonable, documentation is solid, and we're really happy we ended up going the GCP route.
As someone who just dealt with the questionable state of the gcp docs, I couldn't disagree more, afaics there's really no qa on this stuff. to wit, the official docs for turning on storage bucket uniform access are a missing a parameter, that we only found after turning on http tracing on gsutil. The docs themselves are very spread out, and frequently have errors or inconsistencies (ie use beta v1 of this, v1 of that, and alpha v1 for different resources in the same service). Unlike aws or azure, none of the actual api specs (json data) or even the official cli implementation is in a public repo. For python alone, googlers maintain like 4 different implementations of the api, 'nough said.
I've also had some bad encounters with the GCP docs, particularly around object storage. That was a while ago and may have been fixed. Early on they were not consistent with the actual APIs and poorly organized to boot. It was complicated by the fact that the APIs seem to have shifted.
Amazon overall has done an excellent job on documentation. It's made easier by the fact that they rarely change API behavior once it's deployed.
This article doesn't even mention one of my favorite tools on GCP which is Dataflow. It's really easy to build batch and streaming workflows that can be used for data and machine learning pipelines. It really shows how well the different services within GCP are integrated, since it's trivial to set up PubSub or BigQuery as sources and sinks.
Contrary to the claims of this article I'm very skeptical that the admin UI is much of a success factor when running large applications in public clouds.
Cloud administration is inherently complex. If you are doing anything interesting you'll be managing configuration through tools like Terraform and Ansible. Also, if you don't understand virtual networking on your particular cloud you are going to have problems even there. Any cloud service that gives you good control over networking is by definition going to require effort to configure properly.
FWIW, I find the AWS UI much better than the GCP interface. AWS feels much faster to navigate, even though GCP has an SPA-like design, like its other B2B tools.
Since all of GCP is available with an API, I'm surprised there aren't third party dashboards. I'd happily pay a percent or two of my bill for an intuitive dashboard at a glance. Especially one that kinda fills the gap between monitoring, alerting, debugging, and manipulating resources.
What you're looking for is datadog. A metrics/monitoring/alerting/debugging/dashboard solution. https://www.datadoghq.com/.
Try a google image search and you will see some examples. There are lots of menus and visualization so you obviously want to try the tool for yourself.
You know I have to agree with you that AWS UI is more responsive, the UI in GCP is a bit heavy on the JS and sometimes can make the CPU spin. However due to all the reasons stated in the article, I would take that downside any day, twice.
I was once the recipient of a sales pitch for some GCP Apigee products and during the demonstration the control panel glitched at least three different times with loading screens of death and was very slow.
That kind of stuff sticks with you and you know that during an emergency or outage you're going to be battling the UI as well as the underlying problem.
Needless to say we didn't proceed.
AWS might feel a little 2010, but at least I know the control panel is responsive and works. No fluff.
Both AWS and GCP excel over Azure. Many organizations are strong armed into using Azure as part of their Enterprise Agreements (EA) as part of Microsoft's predatory tactics (they haven't changed one bit) I couldn't imagine someone choosing to use Azure if given a choice.
Agreed, I was forced into using it years ago and still have PTSD from how awful it is. API endpoints randomly return with 500s, block devices hang or just become disconnected, provisioning is extremely slow. The unquantifiable "just works" and general care & polish is missing.
sure. the AWS console has been very hard to use since forever. Some may even go as far as saying that it improved. The UX is not the selling point of a cloud provider.
it does not. if you need live migration your software is poorly engineered. the only use case for this is a legacy app that you cannot move away from - but in that case i doubt you’re in the cloud
Readit News
Amazon overall has done an excellent job on documentation. It's made easier by the fact that they rarely change API behavior once it's deployed.
Cloud administration is inherently complex. If you are doing anything interesting you'll be managing configuration through tools like Terraform and Ansible. Also, if you don't understand virtual networking on your particular cloud you are going to have problems even there. Any cloud service that gives you good control over networking is by definition going to require effort to configure properly.
Try a google image search and you will see some examples. There are lots of menus and visualization so you obviously want to try the tool for yourself.
That kind of stuff sticks with you and you know that during an emergency or outage you're going to be battling the UI as well as the underlying problem.
Needless to say we didn't proceed.
AWS might feel a little 2010, but at least I know the control panel is responsive and works. No fluff.
Also I enjoy that GCP has gRPC support.
Azure App Services and SQL database arrives a 1-2 punch for enterprises moving their apps to a PaaS that just works.
Azure is fractally off-kilter.
aws excels at giving you the building blocks and making sure those building blocks work.
unless you’re working at a small scale that’s what you want.
for all the crap aws gets, the documentation is there, the tutorials are there, the services make sense.
gcp is probably going to be around for a while, but i would not bet the farm on it.
in the cloud, today, it’s either aws or azure
Live migration can help you in that case.