This story doesn't get told enough. Most of Google Cloud is built to operate the same way with 1 user or 1m users. And in many cases, Google doesn't charge you

This story doesn't get told enough. Most of Google Cloud is built to operate the same way with 1 user or 1m users. And in many cases, Google doesn't charge you for the "scaling vector", whereas AWS will, and will sometimes even require a separate product (see Firehose). Things like Load Balancer not requiring pre-warming, PubSub seamlessly scaling, Datastore and AppEngine seamlessly scaling. This is especially obvious on the product I work on, BigQuery: - We had a customer who did not do anything special, did not configure anything, didn't tell us, and ingested 4.5 million rows per second using our Streaming API for a few hours. - We frequently find customers who scale up to 1PB-size without ever talking to us. I can be their first point of contact at Google.. after they're at that scale. - Unlike traditional Databases, BigQuery lets you use thousands of cores for the few seconds your query needs them, and you only pay for the job. If I were to translate this to VM pricing, BigQuery gives you ability to near-instantly fire up thousands VMs, shut them down in 10 seconds, and only pay per-second. Customers like that kind of thing :) Disclosure: Shamelessly biased