I don't understand why the reporters hold Google in such high regard, particularly in the cloud business. Here is a statement from the article:
> "At the same time, analysts say, the company’s offerings in cloud development services — computing, storage, data analytics and others — are already comparable to Amazon’s."
AWS is far far ahead of GC and it is in no way comparable. Plus the ecosystem around AWS has evolved and is much more stable. There are a lot of articles explaining "how to fix X or how to do Y" with AWS than with GC.
I also don't think Google will ever have the level of customer obsession that Amazon has. Your account got hacked? No worries, AWS will waive the fee, but I honestly don't think Google will ever do that.
Google is a technology company and might outrun Amazon in terms of technical superiority, but I don't think they can simply outrun Amazon in cloud business.
GCE > EC2, GCS > S3, Big query > Red Shift.
Compute engine costs less and gives you more flops per buck compared to EC2. GCS has unified storage interface to all the storage classes. This makes developer life easy. Amazon has two different services (S3 and Glacier). With Redshift, you create a cluster of fixed size and pay for it whether you use it or not. With Big Query, you just pay for what you use.
I don't have direct experience with Redshift, but I have heard some stuff. BigQuery has really variable performance for us though, not sure how it compares to Redshift.
GKE is miles ahead of ECS, and being based on Kubernetes is huge. We don't really have an equivalent to Lambda (yet?) but classic App Engine isn't actually too far off 'technology-wise' (pay per use, containerized, instant start).
Our lack of IAM is beyond painful. We're sorry. We're fixing it.
PD has had snapshots since Day 1; they're differential, fast and we even encourage people to use them for super-fast "rsync"!
GKE is why I am personally switching from AWS to GCP. I'm running Kubernetes on AWS at my current gig, but I'd rather not have to build and maintain the cluster myself if I don't have to.
Haven't had a chance to try GKE, but I'll give it a whirl for my upcoming project.
With Lambda, its the whole ecosystem around it which makes it better than App Engine. A file changes in S3 and you want to do something? Lambda, in a few simple lines of code.
Google Container Engine is far ahead of AWS ECS. Google does not have a counterpart to Lambda and IAM. Block storage is far better with Google Cloud (Things like the ability to mount a drive read-only on multiple instances simultaneously make sharing data breeze. We ran into some weird race conditions related to inode pointers being modified with AWS EBS sometimes). And yes, it supports snapshots.
Even the terms wouldn't probably make sense unless you've used them. Elastic Block Storage - I surely didn't get what it was supposed to do when I read it loud the first time.
Elastic Container Service - "Why the heck is it Elastic!?" was my reaction the first time I read the term.
> "At the same time, analysts say, the company’s offerings in cloud development services — computing, storage, data analytics and others — are already comparable to Amazon’s."
AWS is far far ahead of GC and it is in no way comparable. Plus the ecosystem around AWS has evolved and is much more stable. There are a lot of articles explaining "how to fix X or how to do Y" with AWS than with GC.
I also don't think Google will ever have the level of customer obsession that Amazon has. Your account got hacked? No worries, AWS will waive the fee, but I honestly don't think Google will ever do that.
Google is a technology company and might outrun Amazon in terms of technical superiority, but I don't think they can simply outrun Amazon in cloud business.