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Your reasoning and the conclusion resonates a lot with my own findings for a project that we tried to bootstrap. GCP's GKE and Istio integration are becoming more compelling to consider them for containerized workloads. EKS isn't quite there. One of the things we are struggling with is finding a qualified partner who can help us build our new project on GCP. We don't have a mature infrastructure team and while we try to bootstrap one, we would like to rely on partners to help us move the needle. Even partners in GCP premier list don't have case studies of migrating monoliths to GCP. Most of them talk about GSuite migration which isn't quite the same. AWS wins this battle. They have far more mature partners with better track record and thought leadership. I wonder if you see this the same way. Maybe partnership is not crucial for you? Some insights from the community would help.

Yes. AWS biggest advantage now is the giant marketplace of vendors and partners so you can get help and managed services for just about anything.

In my experience, most startups just want managed options they can run themselves rather than engaging partners but if that's what you need then AWS will have more companies to offer, although GCP does have qualified partners. I recommend contacting one of the GCP developer advocates either in this thread or on twitter for help, or email me separately and I'll put you in touch.

Also I havent worked with them but https://shinesolutions.com/ has put out plenty of articles and case studies that seems to show they're pretty capable, that might work for you.

Just curious, Which support tier you are using from GCP?

For an early stage startup/Indie developer, GCP support model is not appeasing. $100 Per user for development role is unacceptable. (at least to us, the stage where we are now)

We use the production roles but you don't have to signup every single person, just those who file tickets and interact with support.

If you're very early then you can also try the older support pricing: https://cloud.google.com/support/premium/

If that's still too expensive then you can probably rely on the free support and forums until you have more spend and revenue.

Depending where you're based, there are some very good partners that can help here. It really depends on what level of cooperation you're looking for from "here, you do it" to "just give us guidance along the way".

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/migration-center/ is a reasonable jumping off point. Sorry if that didn't come up more clearly.

We have talked to Velostrata and some other GCP partners. It's hard to assess their usefulness. Unfortunately, they don't have much of open source credibility. Picking by case studies seems like picking out a car by reading advertising material.

I did some perf testing of van’s across azure, gcp and aws.

Gcp was always exactly the same perf, on the button exactly.

Azure was all over the place, fast then slow then fast then slow.

Aws was in the middle.

If you want guaranteed perf then go with gcp 100%

> The major downsides to GCP are the lack of managed services, limited and outdated versions for what they do offer, poor documentation and broken SDKs, and dealing with the opinionated approach of their core in-house products. This usually means as a startup that you are more productive on AWS or Azure because you can get going in a few clicks with a vast ecosystem, while GCP is a better home for larger companies that have everything built and just need strong core offerings with operational simplicity.

That is spot on. After a year of research and testing on GCP and AWS, I concluded with the same thing. AWS is much more startup/indie-friendly.

Our blocker in using GCP is that they do not offer a managed Oracle Database. AWS does with RDS.

We hate Oracle like the next person, but we're locked in. And there's no way we're going to the "Oracle Cloud"

What about running oracle on a google instance with a regional disk? Sure, it's not as sexy as a managed service but functionally it would be very similar.

Not only is it not sexy, it's probably the most work. You're now administering the server, storage & the database; you're the DBA for your Oracle instance and databases; Oracle loves to hammer this scenario for licensing (they'd rather you pay for their "cloud") and paying a premium for the underlying hardware that needs to managed remotely.

I can understand why this is a no-go for the GP.

Yeah, I understand it too; We're currently being squeezed by MS licensing in GCP (but it's basically free in Azure!).

This is the cost of lock-in.

Personally I'd rather have the expertise on staff than pay oracle (and microsoft) for this shitty behaviour.

That's more on Oracle than Google, and probably unlikely to ever happen at this point. They've already increased licensing costs to make it more expensive to run in other clouds.

You know, that's kind of weird. You'd think they'd be really worried about the general trend and would be introducing smaller, cheaper versions of cloud Oracle. Are they just that convinced that people will stick with Oracle? I wonder what makes them think that. I'm not familiar enough with Oracle to take a guess.

What are you talking about, google support is absolutely "some rip off percentage". If you are saying it isn't you clearly aren't working with it at any sort of scale.

Edit: I'm being downvoted but it's true, if you need enterprise support you're paying the same percentages you would on any other cloud service.

https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-options

The role-based support is flat-rate but you're right that the Enterprise tier is $15k or percentage spend. From my experience, most companies are fine with the 1-hour production tier.

I haven't worked with GCP beyond 6 figure scale but I dont think that matters. If you need the 15-min response times and the TAM guidance then that's the fee but at least you can opt-out if you don't.