Ask HN: Why is GCP not as used as AWS/Azure?

I had several thousand dollars in GCP credits but eventually moved back to AWS.

Overall I prefer the philosophy of AWS regions vs global infra. So many GCP outages were global. Also AWS seems very keen on customer feedback (if you are big enough at least).

I won’t touch GCP, even after they gave us 2k credits. Their customer service reps have “well that’s just too bad” on the tip of their tongue. AWS is #1 for good reason

A lot of it seems to be the vastly different quality of documentation and support based on programming language. Where AWS seems low level enough it doesn't matter what language you write your software in, and Azure has made "bring your software no matter what language you write it in" a very explicit message even in its high level cloud offerings, Google gives the strong impression/ego that there are "right languages" and "wrong languages" and they aren't going to support you well (or possibly at all) in the "wrong languages".

Some of that impression is leftover from the way App Engine handled things and the first impression that left, but even GCP documentation itself still seems to struggle outside of "Google approved" languages.

Disclaimer: I interviewed with GCP as a .NET developer with a lot of experience in .NET to try to improve the situation. I got a lot of nasty ego directed at me that interviewers didn't trust my technical expertise because it was in such a "gross" stack and didn't know how to interview me technically. I personally saw that as direct evidence for why I'd never use GCP.

I like GCP quite a bit, and I've architected on it both in the "giant global company" and "small startup" spaces, but it's just not well-positioned competitively. AWS has first-mover advantage and massive lock-in, while Azure has a comfortable second place position with companies that are deeply ensconced in the MSFT and .NET ecosystems and took longer to build a cloud strategy. Meanwhile, GCP was well below feature parity for a long time, didn't really have an enterprise strategy that would allow it to take on its competitors, and never successfully positioned themselves as the startup cloud of choice despite that being their focus.

Today, GCP's still better-positioned for small companies who need to move fast and are more price-sensitive, but they've done a good job catching up on the enterprise space, and having late-mover advantage has helped them avoid some of the footguns you see in AWS. There are still a lot of sharp corner cases in their services and documentation, and they're as bad as anyone else in Google when it comes to taking customer direction (it really helps to have direct contacts in the organization or be a large-scale implementation partner), but they're a perfectly valid cloud option with a lot of great services at relatively aggressive price points (and, arguably, if you're working in health or life sciences, they're actually a very good option compared to AWS or Azure thanks to their extensive healthcare API portfolio). Unfortunately for them, they're never going to be anything more than the fourth-largest global cloud provider, which isn't a bad place to be, but probably a bit humiliating for GOOG.

Slower to market than AWS. Doesn't have their foot in the door as well as MS (due to Win, Office, etc). Never made any real push, or unique value proposition, to meaningfully break in.