1–10 of 80 posts
Correction: I meant to say Google Cloud Platform instead of GCE.
AWS is far ahead in terms of maturity of the service, breadth of services, ecosystem support.
On the other hand, Google Compute Platform is "up and coming", and in general it is trying to attract customers by offering lower-than-AWS prices on most comparable services.
AWS is also a safer bet. At the same time, Google is big enough that betting on it is not as risky as betting on another "startuppy" provider.
If you have to pick one, GCE hands down. AWS has more features but is more expensive and more operationally complex. GCE may have less features, but the ones it has are better thought out and the user experience is in a league of it's own. Also keep in mind that if for some reason you want to take advantage of something like Amazon's video transcoding service, nothing says you have to build 100% of your app on a sing…
Just be sure to stay mindful of the costs of being on multiple providers. In this example, it doubles your outage footprint, because a regional outage on either provider would disrupt your service. It will also moot some of your cost savings, as you can't take advantage of the free local transfer (e.g. EC2 > Elastic Transcoding > EC2 is free; GC > Elastic Transcoding > GC is not).
GCE is preferred for any kind of big data or analytics scenario. It's a cheaper service with way better networking or disk io, fit's very well for an engineering oriented organisation. Per minute pricing or very fast scaling of the services are huge advantages.
How do HN commenters rank Azure amongst the three? I like the UI/portals quite a bit, but haven't explored any of the 3 major cloud providers in great detail.
If I am not mistaken, using GCE means you are locked in and cannot migrate away easily. That's why I never looked into it closely. I don't want to be at the mercy of a provider.