The value to me personally is the reliability. Amazon continues to deliver on highly reliable services, which is IMO the main reason they can charge such a premium.
In my opinion AWS Console is one of the best designed from all cloud providers out there. GCP is years behind, even with $100k credits I just can force myself to use that pice of unusable crap. Probably Material Design is here to blame, as it's terrible on web.
DigitalOcean does a great job with their interface but they don't even have 1/20 of features offered by AWS, at the end it will share the fate of GCP. Being extremely bloated. :)
Azure is 5 years ahead of Google Cloud. AWS is 5 years ahead of Azure. The differences are that extreme.
I hear this for the first time; to me all the Amazon related interfaces I've used have resulted in poor user experience at best. This goes from the store to AWS and sellerscentral should really get a special mention. In AWS, I always felt that everything was super cluttered and important things hard to find, nowhere near intuitive. This goes for high level concepts as much as component behaviors like lists in s3... So, I'd be super curious to hear what you found that was so good. Care to share?
To each their own, but the ability to deploy seemingly endless amounts of computing power to do whatever I want, with the click of my mouse, is something I could only dream of as a kid.
It took me back to that childhood experience of playing with Lego. Everything just "snaps together", and a lot of things that ought to be difficult were shockingly easy.
Mid-way through the project the customer apologised because they forgot to mention that they needed geo-redundancy for every layer, including the database.
It was a checkbox on AWS Aurora. A literal checkbox. I pressed it. There was a progress notification and then it was done. Just like that. A distributed cluster.
I know what's involved, it's not like I haven't built SQL Server clusters dozens of times before, I've even scripted the process before. But it's kind of magic to see it condensed down to a the absolutely most trivial true/false button that it could possibly be.
For example, how do you handle long running asynchronous processing, distributed pub sub, or services that have widely different performance and scaling characteristics?
If you haven’t seen this, it might be time to start looking for a more interesting job.
For a truly distributed system just look at a distributed hashtable. You can do it with a cloud provider, but it somehow contradicts the point of a DHT to control the nodes, does it not?
This is the only use case you see for what I described? Most data processing I saw works exactly like that, too: some compute cluster using a shared persistence layer (either object store or a network filesystem).
Edge computing, otoh, explicitly exists because not everything can be handled well in that way.