
Ask HN: Which cloud behemoth is best for individual learning? - mardnart
I want to get familiar and comfy with cloud concepts like auto scaling, serverless functions, and all that. Which cloud platform is the best all around for learning: AWS, Azure, or GCP? I’d like to take into consideration the cost at low scale (spending double digits per month is fine, probably), the quality of documentation and tutorials, and the breadth of services. How do the three cloud providers stack up for hobbyists, students, and such?
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funkjunky
I'll say this in GCP's favor: it has an extremely generous free tier and a
$300 credit for signing up, a ton of fantastic tutorials and walkthroughs at
[https://codelabs.developers.google.com](https://codelabs.developers.google.com),
and they seem to be at the forefront of most major R&D advances in cloud
computing over the last couple of decades, so you'll probably see new things
there first (managed kubernetes, Spanner, and a wealth of fancy machine
learning shit just to start).

I also recommend going through the "Google cloud architect" and "data
engineering on Google cloud" courses on Coursera:
[https://www.coursera.org/googlecloud](https://www.coursera.org/googlecloud).

The docs have gotten much better over the years, but you have to put in the
time to really dive into them. They are essential reading, so put in the time.

Also the developer tools, (web dashboards, CLI tools, APIs, code libraries,
etc.) seem to be light years better than what I've experienced with AWS and
Azure.

Disclaimer: I used to work Platinum support for Google cloud. Now I'm an SRE
at a company that uses AWS, and I play around with Azure here and there to see
what's what

Whatever you decide to do, I recommend coming up with one idea for an
application that can start simple but grow into something complex, start from
the bottom with a simple deployment, and add pieces as you learn them so you
can understand how everything fits together in the grand scheme of things. I
picked election/voting software, which is good because it starts at just
simple vote counting over an API, then grew to teach me auto scaling, data
pipelines, machine learning analysis, etc.

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weber111
My networking lab class (at a top5 school) used AWS, with the reasons that
it's more widely used and better documented than GCP or Azure.

Tip: You get more free credit (by like 50% iirc) if you sign up for AWS
Educate via the github student developer pack than if you sign up directly

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Kagerjay
Ive been told by many developers firebase does have the lowest learning curve
and friction, gets the job done for smaller projects.

Plus AWS's UX is just plain awful and backwards.

Azure has the best jupyter notebook support for free too

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neilsimp1
Eh, Azure's UI isn't much better. I mean, I really do like Azure for the most
part, but I feel like every time I go into the Azure portal online (every few
months) I need to Google how to find something because it got moved around on
me. And half of the results I find are out of date.

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AtomicOrbital
Invest several days teaching yourself each of them (azure/gcp/aws) ... spin up
a VPS and execute some code then build a serverless service ... I tried each
two years ago and felt gcp was the most enduser friendly ... do not limit
yourself to using those explore open source github repos which provide a
serverless framework then execute you code on a much cheaper VPS from places
like [https://www.ovh.com/world/vps/](https://www.ovh.com/world/vps/) where
you can get a decent 8 gigs of ram box for $14/month

Create a toy domain at domains.google.com which you can use anywhere your
compute runs ... write a server then wrap it with a container and spin up
instances of it to get the feel of microservices ... pickup the language
golang and start using some of the hundreds of API's available

[https://www.programmableweb.com/category/all/apis](https://www.programmableweb.com/category/all/apis)

Throw together several servers just to stream data between them using
different protocols like DASH-MPEG or websockets

Become a master of visualization using D3.js or WebGL to enable you to render
dynamic interactive 3D browser friendly graphics

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scarface74
Go with the old maxim that “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”

The most popular and marketable ones are AWS and Azure. Azure is more popular
in large enterprises.

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mr_toad
> Azure is more popular in large enterprises

The Azure-branded swag is certainly popular in large enterprises.

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kaishiro
Ultimately I think you'll learn a lot from any of the big three, but in my
personal opinion Firebase Functions (really just a thin wrapper around Google
Cloud Functions) will get you parsing request/response with the least amount
of friction. So if you really just want to learn the ins and outs of cloud
funcs/async models it'll get you in to code really quickly.

e.g. -

    
    
      npm i -g firebase-cli  
      firebase login  
      firebase init  
      // Modify index.js  
      firebase deploy --only functions

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auganov
For quite a while AWS and cloud were basically synonymous. It took years for
others to get in the game. And they're still playing captchup. Because of this
quite a lot of 3rd party software targets only the AWS. I mostly hear about
Azure and GCP in terms of discounts, deals and the likes.

