Cloud experience with AWS vs. GCP

Amazon Web Services a.k.a AWS is cloud service developed and managed by Amazon. On the other Google Cloud Platform a.k.a GCP is a suite of Google cloud resources and services. GCP offers Google Cloud Storage, while AWS provides Amazon Simple Storage Services.

Offerings - AWS & GCP Features

AWS can be considered as package that comes with some inbuilt capabilities like using it as a medium for storage or as a database, for analytics, networking purpose and sometimes as a platform for deployment and delivery for development. With AWS managing and configuring infrastructure becomes easier for DevOps. Lot of configuration, setup and apps monitoring or performance related functionalities like scaling etc. can be automated. Its cost-effective as well in sense pay for what you use without any overhead of long-term subscriptions or plan or commitments. AWS also offers some limited AI based capabilities. It offers containers like Docker, Kubernetes.

GCP on the other side of table takes advantage of Google infrastructure and services i.e. safe, flexible and intelligent as well. Apart from some of the regular features that GCP offers like related to infrastructure, analytics, serverless environment for building micro service architecture etc. It also offers capabilities to manage Big Data and build Machine Learning and AI based apps/products. GCP offers only Kubernetes as container.

Limitations - AWS & GCP Cons

Apart from some of the above offerings these cloud providers offers each one comes with some limitations lets check them out. In AWS account management could be bit tedious & tricky at times as each master account has a set of users and roles defined. Hence setting up multiple user roles and permission under one master account is not only pain but managing or using them could be another challenge that AWS pose to its users. For e.g. if you are using terraform scripts then every time as per your project requirement one needs to manage roles across several modules for instance possible set of CRUD or query manipulation and processing operations of a database that it can have for a particular role.

However in case of GCP there is only one master account that you can have to manage rest of your projects for e.g. logging with organisation credentials and set permission for any number of projects. So all spaces like dev, testing, staging, production works out of box and no additional permission or role configurations needs to be done.

Time to discuss about CLI tools that these cloud providers use. For managing GCP from CLI one needs to install Google SDK, with init command redirected to google login page and then for extra security use login with 2FA and you are done here. As your login session gets attached to google session when you kill the session or sign out it gets logged out.

Whereas in case of AWS one needs to create a token to login with CLI and use 2FA on top of it for account security. But that isn't enough you need to create a script for giving you logging session access for defined hours. This script needs to be input every day. But if this is pain one might think of using Web Interface where you need to assign a static ip a.k.a elastic ip to server. If your ip changes everyday that is also some what tolerable but what if it changes every hour nothing major happens except that you would be frequently logged off.

Also if we scroll through AWS web console the interface is at time quite confusing, nightmare and sometimes one can even feel lost if using interface for first time and not quite used to it unless you are using it on daily basis. On other hand GCP has kept its web interface quite simple and straightforward in comparison that you are just few clicks away if you want to deploy or configure something from web console. AWS documentation at times becomes quite messy and time-consuming for beginners to explore and play around unlike GCP which is quite apt. concise and contains only what project demands.

GCP is not that cost-effective and is definitely expensive as compared to AWS as it charges per-minute basis in comparison to AWS that charge per-hour basis. Another major advantage that AWS offers in its suite is it offers a range of cloud services and products whereas GCP tries to specialise in computation offerings like Big Data etc. Also GCP is younger to AWS as it is only six years old on cloud in comparison to AWS which is 11 years older on cloud.

Decision Time - Which Cloud provider ??

No doubt AWS and GCP both are amazing cloud providers based on kind of offerings and services they provide. And each one has its own pros-cons in different scenarios. So, what matters most while making a selection for your respective project/organisation is understanding the needs, what is the expectation you have from your cloud provider in context of performance, data size or maintainability etc. Secondly everything comes with a price hence its important to understand your overall budget or which cloud service is worth investing as per your requirement. Based on these choices the decision among the two becomes a lot more easier, maintainable and affordable to make.