Why GCP is More Usable for Developers

Teams should consider many qualities when choosing a cloud provider like AWS, GCP (Google Cloud Platform) or Microsoft Azure. Product offerings, familiarity, pricing, and usability – among others.

Compared to AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is more usable for developers due to it’s core design approach surrounding resources, projects, APIs and Identities (IAM). This project-first approach avoids common bad practices like spaghetti namespaces, excessive permissions, and accidental exposure. Moreover, GCP includes much more advanced logging & alerting tools, comparable to Splunk and Data Dog, right out of the box.

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Fighting GCP & Firebase Cloud Client CLI and SDK Bloat

Client CLIs & SDKs for GCP, Firebase and other clouds are terribly bloated. GCP includes a python distro, firebase includes node+npm. This goes unnoticed on overpowered devboxes, but impacts your cloud bill with storage, vcpu, wall-time and transfer fees. If you are trying to downsize your VMs, you will find that the client SDK/ CLI pre-requisites will often hang your machine terminal by exausting vcpu and iops budgets. Cloud container services are often storage-limited to ram-disks–so CLI installs consume what little you have.

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