Google swears gcloud support is good, of course, but I've never actually used it -- but then again, I've never actually needed it.

Meanwhile, I need AWS support constantly because their entire platform is a gigantic social experiment in minimum viable products. How crusty are people willing to tolerate? Evidently: very, very crusty.

We don't use most of the platform but the stuff we do use is rock solid (VPC, EC2, RDS, Route53, S3 etc). I do sometimes wonder what the point is for half the stuff they release.

What I do know about GCP is they had a production bug in their tooling that was breaking everything for literally 100s of customers and they never even bothered replying to the bug report on their support forums. That experience along with the general modus operandi of shutting things down that don't further their surveillance capitalism business model means I won't be trying them again.

> I do sometimes wonder what the point is for half the stuff they release.

I'm convinced they mvp every possible idea because it makes their platform more sticky. The more services you use, the harder it is to leave them for something better. The problem with that is you get 100 half dead zombie services and it's really hard to know which services are actually supported and which aren't.

It's the Amazon equivalent of Google creating 10 different messenger applications only Amazon never kills an old service, they just let it rot forever.

It almost seems to me (as an outsider) that Amazon has a policy that any tool they build internally or for a specific customer also has to be offered to the public on AWS. Like their managed satellite service or any number of things that make you say “I’ll bet some critical AWS thing was the first customer of this hyper-specific product”.

AFAIK this is pretty spot on. I don't know if it's "policy" or what, but based on talking with AWS account managers, AWS does not often (or ever) create custom AWS services/products for individual customers. They do however let customers submit feature requests, and then let customers lean heavily on AWS to implement those feature requests in the public AWS services.

I think this is what leads to a lot of MVP-type services. A large customer clamors for some individual niche feature, AWS implements a MVP version of it, and then the team moves on to the next feature request (which might be for a completely different service, leaving the MVP in a perpetual MVP state).

Vice versa for us. Google always has troubles and outages and AWS worked fine. Not sure why.

I launched a large AAA game backed by a hybrid (GCE+Physical) infrastructure and I would swear by their support.

Yes, we paid for enterprise support, but it's especially good. They even contributed code to third-party open source projects to solve one of our bugs.

I hear often about google's support being terrible, but the enterprise support on google cloud is definitely an exception.

F.D: Aside from giving a talk at google stockholm once, I am not affiliated in any way.