I am in a process of choosing between AWS and GC, and the reason I'm leaning towards AWS is that this is Amazon's primary business. They care about it and they know how to deal with customers. Google on the other hand... They could decide tomorrow that GAE is no longer something they want to deal with, and shut it down. Not likely, I agree, but their incentives and mine are not aligned.
I'm not with GCP but I'm fairly closely connected to its technical staff and user community and a heavy consumer and have been so for about 4 years.
It gives me a somewhat unique perspective where I'm happy to give them lip when they need it and they have at times and they also ask for my input fairly frequently. In my opinion they are all in on GCP and it's definitely going nowhere but up. They've been on massive hiring sprees and it's to the point that when I visited them at the Googleplex a few months ago a bunch of their campus buildings were now labeled as Google Cloud buildings.
Obviously logos can be removed and maybe it will say Android/Allo/whatever in 3 years but the team is incredible and they seem laser focused on growing the platform. You can go through their blog https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/ and the improvements they're making and the pace at which they're making them is pretty great.
I've used them for ~4 years so I've definitely had frustrations, especially prior to them reorganizing their Support/Account Management structure about 6-12 mo ago (I do k8s so I interact with this side of things as infrequently as possible).
This is a huge money maker for them and I think they're doing a great job albeit they still need to focus on their soft skills (support, billing pains, etc).
I have migrated a few companies from AWS to GCP and they've all been happy. If the day ever comes to leave GCP I have no problem making that call; I'm not handcuffed to them. Hopefully they just continue to improve.
Thank you! This is interesting to know, and I'm sure the people there are really bright, capable and motivated to bring us the best solution possible. However this is not what concerns me. Willingly or not, they are part of a bigger ecosystem named Google, and the decisions from higher-ups inevitably influence the platform. The culture itself is probably engineer-centric and not customer-centric, which can be seen in differences in support responses.
I must stress out however that these are just my thoughts based on information from Internet, because I don't have extensive experience with either, so I might be wrong.
I've spent a good bit of time with both now. GCP has some real potential but AWS support is nothing short of fantastic. I leaned on them multiple times and had people actively working with me on the phone to get problems solved, following up with me, etc.
I was impressed.
Just got on the Silver plan with Google and only had one support ticket so far, but they got it resolved. Haven't really needed to push it yet, but we will see what happens.
I have a single dependency on Google for my business and I would never take on another one voluntarily. All the horror stories you've heard about Google support have been true for the 10+ years I've been dealing with the Google Maps team. Every year they find some new way to screw up their customer support.
And that's before you even get to your legitimate concern about Google's long-term commitment to any of their offerings.
