GCE is not stable(a kind of forever beta) and misses a lot of the AWS features. It's basically few years behind AWS. I started to hate it but unfortunately I already invested too much in the platform to leave it now.
Pro: it's cheaper than AWS.
For example there is no AWS Certificate Manager. Someday a similar feature may land on GCP but as usually it will be too little too late. IAM was released only recently. Before IAM the auth & auth on GCP was really a joke. GAE management is still not API manageable. You need to use the sdk which has private APIs to deploy new apps or manage versions. What kind of cloud service is that if it doesn't have an API? GAE email service required you(until recently) to create a paid google apps account for each email address you want to use as sender (WTF??). All this was done manually (e.g. in the browser). Recently the service was totally deprecated(i.e. you are limited at 100 emails per day). Compare that with Amazon SES which was a stable and robust product from day one and still works flawlessly. This is really how GCP relates to AWS. At first glance it looks similar but then you find out that's a stripped down version with various restrictions and stability issues.
Last time I've checked the SDK was a mess. Two issues come into my mind:
- I couldn't ssh into an instance because the username for a particular distro was different than in the docs
- I couldn't deploy a docker based GAE Managed VM(now named flexible VM<see stability>). I understand it's beta labelled but when not even the "example" app is not deployable it says a lot about the product stability.
I could make a long list with such issues... If the price is the most important factor and you need basic cloud features and you are fine with a beta label GCP may work for you, otherwise you should look elsewhere.
