Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is the leader in infrastructure-as-a-service and moving up the stack to everything from the Internet of Things to artificial intelligence. The price is very good. The support is excellent. User-friendly and very customizable solution. Fit great with our requirements. Elastic and affordable solution. Gives us the freedom to move away from the hardware solutions. Helped us to significant reduce the cost. Assure us mobility and assure the continuity of our critical infrastructure.

Google was the third entry into the world of cloud service providers (at least from what I can tell). It looks like they took what Azure and AWS does well, and attempted to improve upon them. To me, they've done ok at this. It all seems to depend on which service you're used to using.

We have used Amazon in the past. GCE has come such a long way since then, we have not looked back. IAM and access are on par, cost management is slightly better on GCE. Where we have really seen improvements are the VM types (GCE allows for deep customization that does not require specific images) and ease of use. GCE and the Google Cloud Console are just far easier to use than AWS.

The price is very good. The support is excellent. User-friendly, easy menu, good dashboards and reports. Allows you to have complete control over how you manage your infrastructure. You can have full control over every feature of the process. All things being good, you should find it simple and easy to get started.

We have migrated from Amazon to Google due to performance. We never used Microsoft Azure in production, just for tests.

The two products are very similar. For what we use each for, the difference is negligible, and we actually use both AWS EC2 and Google Compute Engine GCE.

Neither of them has managed a user-friendly approach to setting up the global distribution of computing systems. Modern day business must be able to cater to the entire world instead of being regional to be competitive. Only Google offers this capability, hence why we have no second thoughts on using GCP for such product hosting.

AWS's UI could use a lot of work, and their API documentation was much worse compared to Google's, which was already tough to read and figure out. Google's free trial of their services through a platform credit (which AWS doesn't offer), also helped us test their compute platform, which helped us figure out how to integrate the GPU-accelerated instances into our workflow for no extra cost.

Flexibility of deciding between right cpu and memory.

GCE was an easy choice for us after evaluating our options. We needed something that was dynamic enough to handle our specialized stack, but easy enough that our engineers weren't spending too much time configuring and launching. We found AWS's offering to be similar but confusing in use resulting in misconfigured services and bloat. We used DigitalOcean for a time but outgrew them once our service required more than a few dozen nodes. Heroku was easy to use but ultimately could not handle our unique set of services. Finally, GCE's rich integration with the rest of the Google product line made it easy for our engineers to begin using it with their existing Google Apps accounts.

Pricing scale is good. Google Cloud Compute provides additional facilities free of cost (limited storage). Received one year free credits to get started. Nearest regions are available. Others amenities including free repository service available. UI is modern and fast to load. Google is the most significant company right now. So we have trust and satisfaction of use.

App Engine is somewhat similar, but we use it together with Compute Engine. App Engine is good for serving end requests to users -- it can scale automatically to any number of requests, but has it's own limitations. Compute Engine does not have any limitations. but you have to manage it by yourself and scale it manually as needed. I tried using Amazon's EC2 before the Compute Engine was released, but at that time their UI wasn't friendly, in the end Compute Engine provider much better integration with App Engine since their VMs can be really close to each other to reduce network delay. Google Cloud's UI is really good, you don't always want to manage your stuff using API.

I've used Rackspace, AWS, and Digital Ocean to host virtual environments. In my opinion, GCE has a robust feature set on par with any other mainstream virtual hosting company. I would say AWS and Digital Ocean are comparable, and Rackspace would be slightly less robust than GCE.

All in all, GCE is a standard tool that every engineer should have in their toolbox.

AWS has a ton of options in terms of tools that you can use. It's pricing model is hit or miss (some offerings are simply unaffordable). Some of the API design is questionable at best and frustrating at worst.
Microsoft Azure is a newcomer in the market with focus on enterprise customers. The prior focus on the Microsoft stack (which they've moved away from) has been a huge negative, and something they've had to overcome by layering other tools on top of their system and offering cut rate pricing.

We ultimately chose Google Compute for the price difference as compared to other providers. Google's pricing for Windows servers is even lower than Microsoft's own cloud service, Azure. The terminology used across Google Compute is much easier to understand than the competitors. Rather than S3, Google's file storage service is simply called "Storage". Rather than Lamba, Google's serverless platform is just called "Cloud Functions". It's very easy to get up and running quickly with Google Cloud.

For this particular use-case Google Compute Engine was the better platform as this was a focused development and did not require bespoke infrastructure to support it. The service offered allowed the opportunity to embed core Google apps and services to deliver a quality service to the public.

Google App Engine is slower in comparison, and costs more than Google Compute Engine. We chose Google Compute Engine because Google App Engine was way too slow (mainly due to having to use Google Cloud Storage).