Why I Chose AWS Over Google Cloud
My personal reason for choosing to learn and build with AWS instead of Google’s cloud platform.
Myjourney started 7 years ago.
I was building an mobile app with a partner. Our goal was to get in front of a large audience.
My partner was handling the business side of things, and I, the technical part. This included choosing the technology stack and coding it.
The app allowed freelancers to communicate and collaborate with clients on an online platform.
After a few months, I realized we would need solutions that could scale. Our current infrastructure would not have been able to support the amount of users we were expecting.
So as part of my research for a scalable solution, I fell upon cloud solutions.
I was enthralled. The cloud promised efficiency, scalability, and all the managed services that we would ever need.
I set out to start learning everything I could about cloud computing.
The Choice
Like many other aspiring cloud enthusiasts, I had to make a choice.
Choose a cloud platform to learn. The cloud was so vast I couldn’t possibly learn multiple platforms and therefore had to make a choice.
I started with online forums, seeing what people said about cloud platforms.
Ultimately, it came down to the typical 3 choices:
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Early on I chose Google’s cloud because I had previous experience with Firebase. Since many other GCP services are closely tied to Firebase, it was an easy choice.
But I quickly realized how messy and unintuitive the console was.
Don’t get me wrong the services are great and free tiers are generous (e.g. Cloud Functions and Firestore) but it was lacking in multiple areas.
Things like security was not super well structured nor easy to understand.
Cloud functions were not easy to configure (compared to Lambda in retrospect) — they couldn’t even be modified in the Firebase console.
Additionally, Firebase was not known for scaling high and so ultimately we dropped it.
The decision then came down to Azure or AWS.
Azure was great. I took some courses on learning it and was satisfied overall.
Until I fell upon this one story…
Why I chose AWS
It was a Netflix case study on how the streaming company migrated to the AWS cloud.
In the case study, Netflix described their journey of adopting and migrating to AWS. They talked about how it helped them scale out to accommodate their growing user base.
To me it was magic.
I was impressed by their story and the decision balance started tilting in favor of Amazon’s cloud.
I remember the nail in the coffin for Azure was when I noticed more and more job applications started asking for AWS as a much larger majority than any other cloud platform.
These two elements were enough to convince me to adopt the AWS cloud and learn it as much as I could to be able to use it to scale our freelancing platform app.
The Results
All this is not to say that Azure or GCP are not as powerful or useful. They each have their strengths and weaknesses — even AWS.
But AWS’s popularity was and still is undeniable.
More jobs seek candidates with experience in AWS.
Scores of companies share their success stories about how AWS helped them scale and grow.
Once I made the decision to learn and use AWS for all my web services, I never looked back.
AWS offered all the services we could possibly need, not only right now, but even many years down the line when we needed to grow at larger scales.
The access control services (IAM) were intuitive, serverless services were plentiful and they offered much more scalable databases than what we had tried before.
We had found an easy to learn cloud platform that we could use to solve our application’s problems.
Is the AWS cloud perfect?
Definitly not.
I learned from 7 years of experience that it can get quite expensive if you don’t know how to manage costs and stay on top of them.
But it helps me and my clients everyday to find solutions to pretty much any problem I have thrown at it.
Fast forward 7 years and I now help companies build their businesses with AWS and whether they are big or small, the cloud can support all of their workloads.
I'm creating a free DynamoDB email course and will be dropping some gems there, sign up here:
https://www.buildawaitlist.com/waitlist/dynamodb-course
👋 My name is Uriel Bitton and I’m committed to helping you master Serverless, Cloud Computing, and AWS.
🚀 If you want to learn how to build serverless, scalable, and resilient applications, you can also follow me on Linkedin for valuable daily posts.
Thanks for reading and see you in the next one!