Google Cloud Platform
Everyone’s heard of AWS, most people have also heard of Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) but having used all three in a limited fashion, I have fallen in love with GCP. AWS as most people can attest moves so fast that you have no idea what's going on from day to day. Everything is named oddly, the interface is god awful, yet it has more features than you could possibly ever need. It boasts one of the most impressive free tiers I’ve ever seen. Yet the more I used it the more I hated it. From the UI to the multiple regions that you manage to lose an instance on and leave it for 3 months till you look at your bill. AWS is the big guy in the room but god is he ugly and hard to deal with.
Azure is a great option when you have an MS stack, it integrates exceptionally well with VS and VS code. It has a lot of features but it also suffers from a pretty average UI. Yes, it's much better than AWS but it still has one of the most bizarre login systems I’ve ever seen. When I was working on a project last year I had a personal login, and then two logins attached to my work email, this absolutely screwed up my login, mainly because of LastPass. Yet it was when we gave the client access to look at the usage statistics that I knew it wasn’t just me, stuff disappeared all the time. Same with the client, they would log in and somehow they're in a different project or stuff was hidden. Now, this is 99% my fault, yet even when I went to create instances I found it just slightly harder than it should be. I’ll put the blame on myself for not understanding the product. I still didn’t like it and mostly I couldn’t put my finger on it, it was acceptable and it got the job done but surely there had to be better.
Introducing GCP, two colleagues at Our Very Own (James and Aidan) attended the GCP conference/workshop that was hosted in Melbourne recently. They came out of it with high praise and they boasted a whole bunch of free credit. So I went on to give them a try, I somehow went from $300 of credit to $423.20 which was weird, but I’ll take it. If you didn’t know GitLab also gives you $200 dollars of free credit but I’m yet to get it to work. Immediately I found that it was easy to navigate my way around. It followed all the usual Google-based applications, clicking here produces the same result as what you would expect in Gmail. It just made sense, the naming made sense, navigating made sense and the idea of “Projects” made sense. Both Azure and GCP have this concept of breaking everything up into projects, I’m not sure what Azure calls them but it's essentially the same thing. Yet immediately I just understood how to use GCP. Now I would like to say that for the most part, Azure is just as good but honestly, GCP just clicks for me. GCP has a nice little mobile app just like the others, yet for some reason, it doesn’t list ram usage in its graphs which I personally find odd.
I have no idea about pricing in these three cloud platforms but I do know that they all give you a metric tonne of credit. I’ve done only the basics in all three platforms and have done no formal training but hands down if you don’t need the vastly superior suite of AWS, then don’t waste your time with AWS. If you just need instances, machine learning, databases, functions (Lamdas) you can do it all and more in GCP. Sure you can’t use things like App Sync, AWS’s version of GraphQL as a backend and plenty of other technologies like graph databases. However, what I think helps GCP overall is the fact that Google also owns Firebase. Firebase has been the go-to mobile backend for years, and it has one of the easiest setups for things such as NoSQL storage and authentication. What Firebase did better, in my opinion, is ease of use, everything in Firebase is easy to do. GCP is basically a massive expansion to the platform and as a result, it has taken a tonne of the ease of use and UI prowess. GCP and Azure share much the same in terms of product offerings and if you’re tossing up between them let me tell you unless you’re using an MS stack, don’t think twice, go with GCP.
All in all, AWS is still king, but you’re going to need a PhD to use most of it, then in about 2 weeks it will all be changed and stuff will no longer be where it once was. AWS moves at such a pace and really for sheer value and product offering nothing comes close, but for everyone else GCP sure as hell gives it a run for its money.
If you want to learn a bit more about GCP you can do so at Pluralsight, I personally use them to learn a whole bunch of stuff. They have a fantastic tracking system to see how well you’re progressing and the courses you have completed. They have an enormous range of content, anything from programming to video editing They really helped me out in getting the right start to my career.