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GCP is actually more the 3rd inferior option, behind Azure. Gartner lists Azure as just behind AWS for IaaS providers, and GCP a more distant 3rd:

https://pages.awscloud.com/Gartner-Magic-Quadrant-for-Infras...




I don't have a horse in the race, but I work with Gartner alot, and would encourage you to actually read their guidance carefully and read about the Magic Quadrant methodology carefully. Gartner analysts go through the features and functions very closely, but the magic quadrant ratings are heavily weighted by Gartner customer and other peer feedback.

The magic quadrant isn't a good housekeeping seal of approval. It's a screener for an architect in Fortune 500 or .Gov to show social proof that their product selection isn't insane.

The "cautions" for GCP are about the nascent state of their field sales and solution architects, enterprise relationship management, and limited partner community.

The "cautions" for Azure are poor reliability, poor support, and sticker shock.

My takeaway was very different from yours. When you read the analysis, it was reflective of a mature, dominant player (AWS) and two highly capable challengers with different issues.

Google is a newer business that is missing some services (ie. anything user facing) and is transitioning from a weird sales model to a more conventional enterprise one. Microsoft has an established business process and best in class sales org, but they tend to use sticks of various types to force adoption and are organizationally poorly equipped to support customers.


Azure AKS is pretty terrible TBH in comparison to GKE.

Also lack of SLA / shady SLA does not help.

Ps. Talking as someone with hands on experience.

Ps2. Azure support is terrible and their response times are constantly breaking SLA..


Counterpoint to your PS2 - I've used Azure support at both my enterprise job and my microISV - each time the responses have been quite quick, and each time they have been helpful.

Honestly, I've been pleasantly surprised.


First response is often generated by automat. A generic one “hello this is X ill take care of your case” and the next real person response can happen the very next day when the ticket urgency is CRITICAL. Thats hilarious.

The best support I got a mispleasure to work with didn’t even know how the service Im having an issue is even working... And it was a “technical” ticket.

Seems like after the last round of pouching of best support engineers by AWS, Azure is left with only outsourced mob.


I’m keen to hear what problems you’ve had with AKS if you’ve got time to share them here.


For example - metrics-server provided by AKS from the go is running in highly insecure manner. If you want to change that -> you cannot because they have automatic tools to keep bugging you out.

Another - constant disconnections of PV..

Another - 1/3 times the new provisioned node in vmss has a broken kubelet and doesn’t successfully register in control-plane. I was literally shocked when it happened twice in a single day. Response from support was that we are supposed to monitor that ourselves and drain unsuccessfully provisioned node - (we already were and it was mentioned in opening ticket) makes scaling horizontally REALLY PAINFUL..

CNI default reservation of IPs (30) - cannot be less - so if you have a service node running and you want only few pods to run on it for HA - well sucks to be you.

Kubenet not working until up recently with anything - for example AG, tho AG is a disaster of a service by itself.

Various API failures related to networking - sometimes control-plane lost connection to AKS subnet for some time (fixed by itself by still...)


Gcp is not gke. In my opinion the gke offering fromg gcp is the best right now.


I agree. Though I will say that IAP and gsuite groups backed IAM is nice.


i kind of agree, after trying AKS, EKS and GKE. GKE blows everyone out of the water.


Anecdotal, I know, but for prospective Latacora customers this is absolutely not reflected in market share. It's AWS first, GCP second, Azure very distant third. I'd happily believe Azure is dominating in some segments where MS showers prospective customers with millions of dollars in credit, but IMO a blind person can see Azure does not have the product offering to warrant a "completeness of vision" that is right on the heels of AWS.


According to Canalys, GCP is at 6% cloud market share (in dollars), Azure at 17.4% and AWS at a bit over 32%.

https://www.canalys.com/static/press_release/2020/Canalys---...

AliCloud and Rackspace are very close to GCP as well.

That being said, if you're planning on running Kubernetes, I'd choose GCP over any other offering - the tooling and support just seems better, in my entirely subjective opinion.


Anecdotally and in my opinion, Azure is more complete than GCP. Between stuff like this and their product dropping stigma, most of my customers (in the cloud consulting space) are trying to get into Azure. This is across every industry we work in (retail especially). I've come across 2 customers in 3 years of consulting that want anything to do with GCP.


> Azure is more complete than GCP

It has more features, yes. How well those features work is another matter entirely.


Can you give more details on this? Anecdotal is fine

I loosely follow AWS, GCP and Azure but I always get mixed opinions on them, especially the last two


I use only small subsets of Azure, but every bit that I do use leaves me with a feeling that I'm the first user of a minimum viable product.

To pick a random example that I'm familiar with: Azure DNS Zones.

When I used AWS Route 53, the main issue I had with it was that I thought the cutesy marketing name was stupid. That's about it. By reading through the docs, I learned a little bit about DNS I didn't know, and I got to learn about the clever engineering that AWS did to work around issues with the DNS protocol itself. In the end, it had more features than I needed, and the basic stuff Just Worked.

When I tried to use Azure DNS, their import tool shredded my data. I then wrote a custom PowerShell import tool, but it took hours to import a mere few thousand records. The next day my account was locked out for "too many API calls" because I simply had the console web gui open. Not used. Open. The GUI showed entries different to the console tools. The GUI string limits don't match the console tool. The perf monitor graph was broken, and is still broken. Basic features were missing, broken, or "coming soon".

You would think DNS would be one of those services that "just works", but nope. Bug city.

Now mind you, most of those issues are fixed now, and they're adding more features and fixing the issues those new features are introducing.

But ask yourself: Why are buggy features being rolled out in production? Did nobody test this shit? Did they ever do a load test? Did they even try basic things like "have the console open with more than 10 records"? Why am I discovering this? Do they not have thousands of customers who have battle-tested this stuff?

Clearly they're just throwing things over the fence and letting support tickets be their QA feedback.

PS: It's even how they use DNS themselves that's just wrong. E.g.: If you use Azure CDN you end up with like 6 CNAME redirects in a row. The DNS standard says CNAMEs shouldn't point to other CNAMEs! At a minimum this is slower than it needs to be, but it's also less reliable because there's more points of failure...


What essential product offerings is Azure missing that AWS have?

My experience is that once AWS offers a new service that gets attention, a few month later also Azure offers it - and vice versa.




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