I have used both GCE and AWS. Current I have website that is hosted on GCE, but I am using Cloudways managed platform because I am not good with server configuration thing. GCE is definitely better in performance and cheaper in pricing than AWS. Their block storage is more than AWS and they have native load-balancing technology which AWS does not have have. The only downside I have felt with GCE is that they are present in less regions than AWS. Google should also work on expanding their presence to more regions.
Well, there's spot instance pricing and reserved instances with AWS that nobody can touch. What "native load balancing" are you referring to that has no equivalent with AWS? There are many options for EBS - including magnetic storage. I doubt you can beat the speed of EBS with provisioned IO! Maybe you weren't using the right type for your need!
We have our own spare capacity product called preemptible VMs (cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms) with a similar discount and no need for bidding (Disclaimer: I worked on it). Also, we don't have reserved instances because our sustained use discounts, per-minute billing and continued year-on-year price drops make more sense than any of the RI combos (1 yr is worse than our pricing with sustained use, 3 years locks you out of price drops).
As to load balancing, I assume the poster is referring to the need to "pre-warm" ELB if you actually want to scale while our Maglev based load balancing goes from 0 to 1M qps within a minute.
Finally, EBS with provisioned IOPS is a good product! But so is PD-SSD, and you don't need to be a storage expert to get the best performance.
As others have pointed out, we've made a lot of progress in the last couple of years. Give us a closer look!
From AWS article on Best Practices in Evaluating Elastic Load Balancing, section Pre-Warming the Load Balancer:
"In certain scenarios, such as when flash traffic is expected, or in the case where a load test cannot be configured to gradually increase traffic, we recommend that you contact us to have your load balancer "pre-warmed". We will then configure the load balancer to have the appropriate level of capacity based on the traffic that you expect. We will need to know the start and end dates of your tests or expected flash traffic, the expected request rate per second and the total size of the typical request/response that you will be testing."
Edit: This means ELB could not deal with sudden spikes of traffic.
Although we've used to call support and request a higher capacity ELBs (you can't get this automatically), recently we stopped doing it recently and handle spikes from 1,000 to 100,000 concurrent users within a couple of minutes without a sweat. By the way, many people are unaware, but CloudFront distributions also need to be upgrade to handle spikes similarly to ELBs.
