* AWS makes the best 0th impression (the whole "nobody gets fired for choosing AWS" and as you said you can justify it based on absolutely no knowledge of it's details just purely on reputation)
* Google makes the best 1st impression, by the virtue of it's beautiful consistency of behaviour, SDK standardization, clean billing models, and overall cross-platform cohesion. It just seems like you can learn GCP faster at first.
* But AWS makes the best 2nd and subsequent impressions, as you realize consistency and clarity lacks the depth of AWS, or the true productivity gains by native services - native services Google has mostly rejected in favour of doubling down on it's K8S offering as a differentiator. While GCP can seem faster to learn, in practice building on AWS is actually faster and you can go build new full applications from scratch that you're happy operating in production quicker.
- They both throw credits at companies. - Services are similar. - Prices are similar, although Google sometimes has silly costs for "enabling" a service/API. - GCP dashboard is snappier. - AWS has good support.
I'd wager the quality of support is the main differentiator.
But I’m in Sweden and AWS keeps sending “sales engineers” who don’t know what the product is doing under the hood.
The support team I deal with has always pulled in the actual devs from AWS if we have a particular question about a service. In terms of understanding our product we send them diagrams and they are well informed.
I have a lot of information about how the services are functionally working underneath (under NDA, unfortunately) and what their limits are, they even informed us of their recommended course of action based on what we're trying to accomplish, they even invited me to feedback on their roadmap to understand what features are most desirable and even what UX patterns made the most sense to me, personally.
Of course, we were paying for enterprise support, but even during pre-sales they were giving us this information, I.E: when we were onboarding and before we had a contract in place.
We had an enterprise support contract with AWS too, that was the blessed provider at Ubisoft, but all I ever saw from them, upon multiple requests for technical assistance: was a dude telling me S3 is essentially magic, and that there's no such thing as a capacity limit in their cloud. Given that I managed to hit capacity limits in Googles and Microsofts Clouds pretty easily, I'm not sure I believe them.
I'm going to guess you're in North America? it feels like people in NA get a good support experience with AWS; however it's my experience that Europe gets absolutely shafted.
I believe the EU is following what america does in this regard, perhaps because of some potentially misplaced thought that the America is doing best practice. (or because Americans lead the world in software, so all software tends to support AWS natively).
He came back to visit us in Sweden 3 times because we kept asking for a technical contact to explain things for us.
I work for a US company now that's on AWS, the experience is very different from that.
Also, azure is the most pure play from them all and constitute the majority of MS revenue , while AWS and GCP are both a side business to the core business.
People go AWS because it’s the default, easy to hire people who know it, AWS are willing to throw credits at you if you’re in the US and once you’re on the platform it’s a serious effort to get off due to weird lock-ins.
Azure has its niche in the windows market, a lot of smaller orgs are going AzureAD as a replacement (or in addition to) a normal on-prem AD solution, once you’re on the platform it’s easy to just use more of it and consume existing contracts.
It helps immeasurably that if you’re running windows workloads they “happen” to be reasonably priced, as opposed to other cloud providers.
It’s a shame, because google cloud is definitely my favourite of the public clouds, I hope it doesn’t go anywhere and I’d be extremely happy to go back to it after using AWS for a while now.