AWS is certainly very capable but I haven't at all found that everything AWS is easy or makes sense and that's certainly not the general reputation it has among other devs I know. It's quite baroque and the UI is chaotic and confusing and the documentation is very badly organized.
> It's quite baroque and the UI is chaotic and confusing and the documentation is very badly organized.
I’ve got no real love for AWS, but I do have some hate for GCP.
The UI is chaotic, cluttered, and has no sense of hierarchy. There’s very little consistency, and poor information hierarchy. On a page with eight layers of toolbars (why?!), it’s not unusual to find two things that conceptually seem to operate on the same thing in entirely different places.
Even pages I use almost every day in the Google Cloud Console I find myself unable to find common functionality. I literally wasted hours one day looking, googling, looking, searching the raw DOM, and more trying to find a panel that the documentation said was on a page only to find they’d introduced a brand new type of widget just for that page and apparently it automatically hid and left you just a tiny icon with no description off in a cluttered corner of the screen to reveal it.
Let’s not even get started on permissions.
I’ve never struggled as much with any other product.
And as for the documentation, well… at least AWS _has_ comprehensive and effectively always up-to-date/accurate documentation. It might be a slog to get through, but it’s extremely rare it doesn’t have the answer I’m looking for.
I’ll never get back the time I’ve spent blindly hammering away at GCP to figure out how it’s supposed to work. Or worse, the time I’ve spent following the documentation only to, after all my effort, find the random 5 year old GitHub issue about how the documentation is out of date and inaccurate and the project needs to be accomplished a totally different way… which it turns out was also out of date! Third time’s the charm!
My experience with GCP has been so bad over the past… almost decade now? in every aspect that my immediate reaction to the top level comment was to assume it was a troll as soon as it started praising GCP. I’m honestly shocked to find other people in here defending it.
