At TicketCity we’re heavily invested in Google’s advertising products, so I’ve been exploring Google Cloud Platform. The marketplace has been running on AWS, but with such simple integration between Google’s ad tools and Cloud, I wanted to take a more thorough look at GCP and see how it compares to AWS.

I’ve always thought the great promise of “the cloud” was democratization of technology. A single developer can, for very low cost, tap into tremendous resources. The ideal is that problems can be solved faster since there’s less boilerplate and technical overhead. Developers can focus on the problem faced by their business while someone else handles the generic work. AWS coined the term long ago to describe all that extra work: undifferentiated heavy lifting.

However, the promise falls short when you get stuck into a project only to get blocked by wiring cloud services to work together in something beyond the Getting Started example. If you’ve ever tinkered with a finicky Cloud Formation template or helped a developer debug IAM permissions, you may have doubted if this is all easier or if the undifferentiated work has just been pushed somewhere else.

To be fair, AWS has made big improvements here over the last few years. Setting up a Lambda-backed API Gateway is much easier today than it was two years ago. But as someone who spends a lot of time in AWS on work and personal projects and has become adapted to the AWS way of thinking, my first impression of GCP is that everything is so much easier and more intuitive. The console is clean and useful for most tasks and the built-in shell is handy for anything that is API-only or requires a little more specificity.

Everything seems to just work as expected. If you’re setup with G Suite, creating an organization and provisioning accounts is trivial (in contrast to Azure, where being setup on 365 seems to make things more difficult, not easier). The project structure make it easy to group teams and permissions appropriately and spinning up a new account and project is fast. Free tier is at least comparable to AWS, and is plenty generous to get started on real work. I’m sure the shine will wear off eventually, but GCP is getting me to believe in the promise of the cloud again.