Why We Moved from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud Platform
I use AWS extensively and it has many benefits. That said, I think they need to rethink some thing if they want to stay ahead of Google, Digital Ocean, etc.<p>Some thoughts:<p>## More focus on core products<p>- Still no IPv6, it&#x27;s 2016.<p>- EC2&#x2F;VPC (compute) didn&#x27;t have a simple NAT-instance until a few months ago.<p>- S3 (storage) still has nothing like Nearline (GCE) and Glacier is so confusing and complicated that few bother using it.<p>- ELB (Load Balancer) still has scaling problems (with bursts).<p>- Still only a single public key per instance, why?<p>- Can only use ACM certificates for CloudFront if they are in us-east-1 (despite ACM being available in other geographies and CloudFront is global). Nothing major but weird.<p>- S3 has like a handful of different ways of setting permissions (per file, per bucket, iam, and some weird old xml-format). Why not simplify this?<p>## Interfaces are terrible<p>- Basically the entire console UI is low quality.<p>- Same with APIs, they could use a lot more polish.<p>- This is the API call to create a CloudFront (CDN) distribution: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastie.org&#x2F;10931494" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastie.org&#x2F;10931494</a> (no offence, but it looks like a group of schizophrenic monkeys designed that API).<p>## Think less about press-releases<p>- Apparently AWS force everyone to write the press-release for every product before designing[1].<p>- While it&#x27;s good to keep the end-goal in mind I think many important details are lost.<p>- The press-release-thinking focus too much on features and too little on quality and (even more important) refinements to existing things.<p>## Release fewer features<p>- Every year on ReInvent [AWS conference] they tout how many hundreds of new features they&#x27;ve released[2]. I wish they&#x27;d release far fewer features and make them great instead (+ refine existing stuff).<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allthingsdistributed.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;11&#x2F;working_backwards.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allthingsdistributed.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;11&#x2F;working_backward...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com&#x2F;vpblogimg&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;Aws-Summit-2015-London-innovation.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com&#x2F;vpblogimg&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;Aws-Sum...</a>