A peek at the massive scale of AWS
I'm a longtime AWS user. Recently I decided to see how the competitor clouds offering stack up - because I've read a lot about how the second-movers in the space have caught up to Amazon. And that now there's basically no difference between the offerings.<p>I decided first to try Google - specifically Google App Engine. Just to see if I could get a plain vanilla base case working quickly. And my initial reaction was that AWS is still head-and-shoulders above everyone (or at least Google). The Google UI and setup process seemed ridiculously complicated and unfriendly. With AWS, I was up and running almost immediately. Not so with Google.<p>So I immediately ran back to AWS and dropped Google. I'm not sure if my bad experience with Google was because I had framed my expectations through my AWS experience and thus wasn't able to use Google the way it intended to be used. But it just seemed way too unfriendly. It seemed to require needless dev installs that should just be automated.<p>When I went back to AWS, just the sheer amount of services they offer seemed staggering by comparison. Google still has products in BETA that AWS has in mature mode.<p>I was going to try out other competitors like Azure, Digital Ocean, etc. but now feel like there's no need. AWS is just good.