There’s no mistaking that Amazon Web Services is incredibly dominant in the cloud. The company has released so many products and created so many amazing tools that the marketplace has responded by rewarding AWS with an insanely high percentage of the world’s business.
But that doesn’t mean that AWS is the only game in town. Google is running hard and creating cloud products from all of the expertise it used to build the dominant search engine. Google Cloud Platform is very competitive and in some respects might be said to be better.
Better? Well, it’s hard to say that some cloud products are head-and-shoulders above others because the products themselves are often commodities. A machine running the current version of Ubuntu or a cloud storage bucket that stores a few gigabytes are about as interchangeable as sunny days in the desert.
Still, the cloud companies are finding ways to differentiate themselves with extra features and, as is more often the case, slightly different approaches. Google’s cloud products are starting to develop a style all of their own, a style that echoes the powerful simplicity of many of Google’s consumer-facing products.
Some of this style is apparent as soon as you log in because many of the tools aren’t too different from the widely used G Suite. The user interface has the same primary colors and clean design as the major customer-facing apps like Gmail. Finding your way through the maze of configuration screens is much like finding your way through Google’s office applications or search screens. Less is more.
