I complained about a separate issue with GCP. The product manager found my tweet and told me it was my fault for using a service marked as "preview". He then told me I should have used a different service, which was also marked as "preview". They were rude and defensive and made no attempt to resolve my issue. We decided to just not use GCP for the project as a result.
Neither of these are isolated stories. I have multiple examples of GCP staff just being super rude for no real reason, while AWS regularly goes above and beyond with customer service.
One time two very competent guys shows up on site and let me reproduce the issue, agrees it is a serious bug and promises to take care of it.
Next time I get connected with what seems to be two part time students or something who doesn't seem to have a clue about the product.
Then in a third case some technical architect or something looks into my stack overflow question, verifies there is a known bug and it will be fixed in next monthly rollout, but I never saw a fix.
I have a hard time using any of google's stuff - cloud, whatever. Have had to deal with 'google search console' recently. "Give us your sitemap!". OK... "Could not fetch". The explanation for "could not fetch" might be "couldn't fetch" or "hasn't fetched yet" or "read but not processed" or "error reading" or.. anything else. On March 9, I had a sitemap entry listed as "couldn't fetch" updated to "last fetched date" of March 10 (9am UTC-4, so not even close to march 10 UTC time). It's just.... buggy. Colleagues currently moving stuff to google cloud (by edict of cto) are encountering bug after bug after slowness after flakiness. Google "support", to the extent they answer, says "we don't know".
Might it have been 'technically better' on day one? perhaps. But if it's buggy/flaky to deal with, and they have no support, not sure how you'd even verify the "technically better" part. How would you trust any numbers you see reported in their own tools?
Had to use GCP stuff about 6 years ago. It was flaky/slow and relatively unsupported then. Watching colleagues go through stuff today, in 2023, it seems no better.
Roles/Permissions in GCP is just done better. The whole system of having to switch roles to be able to see stuff across multiple accounts in AWS is opaque and confusing. TrustPolicies are powerful but feel unnecessarily complex for almost every use case. Google has its own warts around permissioning (doing things often requires an opaque role that you have to look up, the error message is often unhelpful). However, it’s better than unraveling the series of permissions needed to, for instance, have an app pull from an S3 bucket in AWS.
AWS sucks at naming things. Everything is some nonsensical acronym that only makes sense to salespeople at Amazon. When you wonder what Google’s load balancer product is called, you look it up and it’s perhaps unsurprisingly called Elastic Load Balancer.
Another plus for Google: Having IAP as a first class citizen is a nice way to avoid having to set up bastions etc when prototyping.
On the other hand, we just spun up a Karpenter instance in EKS, and according to my colleague it’s much better than Google’s Autopilot product.
Also there is a whole industry around getting support from Google, lol. We use DoIT at my place of work, which is a company whose entire business is to pool together customer accounts for volume pricing and white glove support from Google. Interestingly, the cost savings from volume pricing are so significant there’s no cost to end users for using DoIT.
Your point is valid and something I've felt many times as well (Route 53 means DNS somehow???), you just happened to choose literally the only AWS product that is well named.
Otherwise what would they do when they inevitably get discontinued?
It's a shitshow. Their design is ridiculous, overcomplicated and opinionated. It's clear they are run by engineers because no sane human would choose to use GCP knowing how bizarre and painful it is.
Creating an IAM role isn't strongly consistent. You have to build your own polling logic to wait for it to be done to attach a policy to it. Even using their own Terraform provider. If I worked there I'd be embarrassed.
AWS and Amazon as a whole has always had stellar support. And they'll continue to receive my business in both as long as that holds true, even though we rarely use it.