AWS is definitely the leader. But Microsoft Azure is giving them a run for their money, and is stealing away a lot of the big clients. Azure is adding new products quickly and adding features to existing products to stay competitive with AWS. I've noticed that Azure seems to be much more "focused" than AWS. Meaning that AWS has a lot of random/niche services. Azure doesn't compete against these, but focuses on being ultra-competitive in the core services that enterprise customers really want. And I do think AWS execs are spending a lot of time talking about Azure and trying to keep the competitive edge. I don't think AWS execs are spending much energy worrying about GCP.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a bit of a joke. I really don't think it is all that competitive. Its trying to stay caught up and they do offer a lot of similar services. But their documentation is all over the place. Their service administration is a disaster. You can tell that each product is built by separate teams that only meet together once a quarter over Zoom. Its very disjointed. GCP is definitely trying to play catch-up. That isn't to say that you couldn't build a powerful platform ontop of GCP, many respectable companies are doing it. Discord is one that comes to mind that is (or at least was...) built entirely on GCP. I don't want to say it is shit. But its not as cohesive as Azure and AWS.

Basically AWS and Azure are the two core competitors. I really think that in practical (non-niche, using core services) they are neck and neck. GCP is in the race, but definitely lagging behind the others.

GCP is behind. They're are behind in niche services to be fair but behind nonetheless. Nothing that prevents building similar services, but coming from AWS, I routinely feel frustrated by lack of finesse and comparable offerings. IMO, GCP's greatest benefits over AWS are:

* BigQuery

* Tighter k8s integration with GKE

* Single message service (PubSub)

Unless BigQuery is your first class citizen, I would avoid GCP.

Google also has a trust problem. As in they lose interest in things quickly.

I would only consider them if I need a massive scale of something they are cheaper on, that can quickly be migrated elsewhere.

This is such an overblown talking point.

If you sign a service contract with Google (which you will if you are spending any amount of serious money), then you will have a precisely defined guarantee that they will continue operating GCloud.

I doubt anyone’s service contract stipulates that Google will continue to invest heavily to keep feature parity with AWS and Azure for the next 20 years

Bingo. I’ve had to move a companies entire platform multiple times because of similar issues. I want boring on infrastructure.

AWS has a trust problem - they have no qualms about observing that your product is valuable, cloning it, and leaving their 'customer' in the dust.