Cloud

Major Public Cloud Providers

A common staying:

Google’s Beta is like AWS’s GA

Google is strongly consistent eg. GCS consistent lists and gets, KMS global consistent, Cloud Spanner
- AWS has a lot of eventually consistent services, which pushes complexity to the developer
GCE can configure any CPU / RAM ratio and has few simpler instance types: micro, standard, highmem, highcpu
GCP resource names are shorter or named yourself, not <tonnesOfChars>.cloudfront.net
GCP console global view
- AWS region view
GCP doesn’t requires 2FA every day like AWS
GCS S3 API doesn't require S3 Proxy like Azure
GCP live migrates VMs
- AWS maintenance requires a reboot
GCE Preemptible instances 80% discount for 30 sec warning
- AWS Spot Instances with 2 min warning - GCE can spin up instances quicker though as a result
GCE Committed Use Discounts buy CPU / RAM / disk 1 to 3 years can be used on any instance in region, unlike AWS Reserved Instances which are tied to family
- automatically applied to anything you run, and above that Sustained Use Discounts are applied automatically
GCP networks are global with no cost for inter-region traffic
- AWS requires NAT Gateway (or deprecated Nat Instance) for inter-region VPC traffic

AWS Billing better reports + estimated usage
- GCP only alerts on actual usage, must set 25%, 50% alerts etc.
  - new Billing Forecasts feature may solve this forecast alerting

GCP developer focused moving towards ops
- builds innovative tools that you couldn't build/deploy yourself
- global focus - easier to handle latency & failures
AWS ops focused moving towards development
- strip-mines open source tools and automates their management
- regional focus - simplifies data sovereignty

GCE default I/O is faster than AWS which requires using Provisioned IOPS EBS volume which cost almost double
GCE block storage 10TB max vs AWS 1TB max (check these as these sorts of limits change over time)
GCE block storage can be mounted read-only to many other instances
AWS more instance types
AWS more regions + availability zones
GCE live migration of instances for zero downtime when doing host hardware maintenance, but may need to downtime an entire site??
GCE auto restart option, auto-respawns in < 3 mins
AWS more services
AWS more OS images
AWS has spot instances
AWS has reserved instances
AWS developer / business support is cheaper than GCP (49 or 100 dollars for AWS vs 150 or 400 dollars for GCP)
AWS LDAP or custom users without email, Google require GMail account
AWS uses Xen, GCE uses KVM
GCE snapshots are global not region + copy
GCE better inter-region speeds (300 vs 40MB/s)
Google has better global dark fiber network

When you're a senior engineer from before the era of Cloud and see your Cloud Billing costs: