I guess the broader question would be: Why use GCP? I like them well enough, but I find it easier to prototype on AWS. Why would a developer develop the MVP on GCP vs AWS and then go to scale there? (I realized that K8S has made this, recently, a moot point, and it comes down to cost ... but beside that is there anything?)
EDIT: I realize that as a neo-Luddite, I just might be used to AWS, and would be open (mostly) to arguments to move to GCP if it is better (I'm not not talking about $/Gbps)
EDIT2: As a (mostly) fan of Google - I probably would have gotten myself acclimatized to their platform if it was any good 10 years ago, but it wasn't, so I didn't, and I guess I'm asking: is there a good reason to learn how to switch?
GCP has better performance (especially raw storage, compute and network), cheaper and simpler pricing, and more consistent experience. The raw primitives to build with are better designed and integrated, and scale without any tuning.
We're not building MVPs (which are just as easy) but have a working product and only use GKE and VMs. If you need all the managed services then AWS is the right choice, but K8S has made that a non-issue for us and allows us to use VMs (which are the most reliable part of any cloud), along with spot/preemptible pricing and better colocation for efficiency.
I don't use managed services, because I want portability, but you are right (and as I think I said upstream) K8S has made many of the issues in production moot.
You say that you find that prototyping is as easy with GCP as with AWS? Do you believe it is because you are familiar with GCP? Or do you believe that they are truly at par with prototyping productivity?
(And yes - we've gone far afar of the upstream topic - but I do appreciate your feedback)
I dont know what you consider as prototyping, but yes they both can run a basic app with minimal effort.
Look into AppEngine which is a few CLI commands for deploying. Same with Firebase which is widely considered a great mobile platform with everything you need. You can also use the Serverless.com framework to build apps on Cloud Functions, and they recently announced running any container in a serverless fashion (similar to Azure's ACI).
If you still want to run servers, then they have the best VM platform around.
I guess the broader question would be: Why use GCP? I like them well enough, but I find it easier to prototype on AWS. Why would a developer develop the MVP on GCP vs AWS and then go to scale there? (I realized that K8S has made this, recently, a moot point, and it comes down to cost ... but beside that is there anything?)
EDIT: I realize that as a neo-Luddite, I just might be used to AWS, and would be open (mostly) to arguments to move to GCP if it is better (I'm not not talking about $/Gbps)
EDIT2: As a (mostly) fan of Google - I probably would have gotten myself acclimatized to their platform if it was any good 10 years ago, but it wasn't, so I didn't, and I guess I'm asking: is there a good reason to learn how to switch?