ECS wasn't too bad. The approach they took made sense when it first came out but Amazon haven't evolved the idea since then. Personally I think that GCE's edge won't come from their container support since AWS and Azure both support k8s but will come from their value-add analytics and data services like BigQuery, Dataflow and so on. If Azure and AWS can't compete on that front then GCE will start to cannabilise the customers who are only still using the respective cloud providers only for infrastructure. GCE still has a long way to go before it becomes a serious contender.
I'm overall pretty optimistic about AWS, but if they do end up losing to another platform I would expect it to be due to this general issue of not iterating on their offerings enough. I can't really recall them ever deprecating a service, e.g. forking something to a v2 and killing off v1after a certain amount of time. So with everything they release they only give themselves one chance to get the core of it right.
Right, but that's kind of the problem. If I were signing up for the first time and needed a simple db, I might see the SimpleDB service in the dashboard and try it out, not knowing its been unofficially deprecated.
Similar from what I can tell with CloudSearch being superceded by Elasticsearch Service. Although their version of elasticsearch is ~2 years old and hasn't been updated since they launched the service, so this may be a case where neither are getting any attention.
The worst part is, AWS support is so tight-lipped in the forums and over web support that there's no way to tell what is still fully supported and what's being silently put out to pasture. You have to look for hints based on what products they're doing webinars about, looking at the momentum of what products they're making tweaks to in the weekly update emails, etc.
What do you mean it has a long way to go? What exactly is missing in GCE compared to AWS? You just stated something you would be an edge in the future, but no cons it seemed like.
Interested to know because we're considering cloud providers.
GCE is not stable(a kind of forever beta) and misses a lot of the AWS features. It's basically few years behind AWS. I started to hate it but unfortunately I already invested too much in the platform to leave it now.
Pro: it's cheaper than AWS.
For example there is no AWS Certificate Manager. Someday a similar feature may land on GCP but as usually it will be too little too late. IAM was released only recently. Before IAM the auth & auth on GCP was really a joke. GAE management is still not API manageable. You need to use the sdk which has private APIs to deploy new apps or manage versions. What kind of cloud service is that if it doesn't have an API? GAE email service required you(until recently) to create a paid google apps account for each email address you want to use as sender (WTF??). All this was done manually (e.g. in the browser). Recently the service was totally deprecated(i.e. you are limited at 100 emails per day). Compare that with Amazon SES which was a stable and robust product from day one and still works flawlessly. This is really how GCP relates to AWS. At first glance it looks similar but then you find out that's a stripped down version with various restrictions and stability issues.
Last time I've checked the SDK was a mess. Two issues come into my mind:
- I couldn't ssh into an instance because the username for a particular distro was different than in the docs
- I couldn't deploy a docker based GAE Managed VM(now named flexible VM<see stability>). I understand it's beta labelled but when not even the "example" app is not deployable it says a lot about the product stability.
I could make a long list with such issues... If the price is the most important factor and you need basic cloud features and you are fine with a beta label GCP may work for you, otherwise you should look elsewhere.
