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Why people keep saying that GCP UI/UX is good. Is it because of Firebase? Because granted, that's a very nice UX. But when you log in to the GCP console that th

Why people keep saying that GCP UI/UX is good. Is it because of Firebase? Because granted, that's a very nice UX. But when you log in to the GCP console that thing is a fucking mess. Way more complicated than AWS, with a very subpar UX... And don't get me started with their documentation. What a piece of crap. It's like nobody thought that things of this nature require a clear hierarchy. It's just a blob of concepts organized in no meaningful way... Not saying that AWS is perfect, but at least with their documentation, you just gotta keep reading until you find what you need. With Google Cloud sometimes you hit these walls that take you out of context and the only solution is to close that tab and start again. Ohh. And just to be fair with everyone crappiness in this space, Azure is even worse. Their console is another horrible experience. Nobody in this industry thought about the UX of these things. They are all disastrous... And believe me that I have studied this from multiple angles. I worked at AWS for two years trying to solve UX issues and it's just an endless battle. Developers deserve better user experiences... Nobody is thinking about this with the intensity and focus that it deserves.

maktouch 7y ago
In GCP, I çan see all my instances of all regions in one go. I can't do that with aws. In GCP, I can easily create networks between projects. It's really shitty to do in aws. In GCP, I can create a machine and everyone in my team automatically has ssh access. In GCP, I can make an instance, then mark the IP as reserved. In aws, I have to reserve the IP first. Aws UX is the worst. I use both on an everyday basis. I could go on and on..
- whoisjuan 7y ago
  It seems that you are talking about features. I never said that AWS UX isn't horrible. It is. But GCP is also pretty shitty. They don't deserve any praise in this area at all. They have useful features but that doesn't mean their UX is good.
  - maktouch 7y ago
    Well, UX means user experience. If some little features give you a better experience to me, a user, isn't that a better UX? They both have regions. One makes it easier to see at a glance. They both have the concept of reserved IP, one doesn't need to be set first. They both install ssh keys for you. One does it per user, the other per instance. One sets up cross region VPC for you. The other one makes you suffer and do it yourself.
    - whoisjuan 7y ago
      Yeah, you're right. That's definitely a better UX. But since OP was talking about GCP UI as a potential value differentiator, I was also focusing on that. Certainly something like an easy VPC setup improves the overall experience within the platform. But I was referring to things like their documentation, the way they organize resources inside the Web Console and the confusing paths to different functionality within their UI.
    - redredrobot 7y ago
      Making it hard to cross regions is deliberate - I would guess it's a learning from s3 being designed as a global service. And I think if you compared global outages across cloud providers, you would see that strong region isolation has substantial benefits.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    It seems like you're confusing UI and UX. My experience with either UI is almost nil, so I can't comment, but an ugly UI that streamlines common patterns and has sane and unsurprising defaults has good UX. As far as I know, you can accomplish all of the things GP mentioned with either AWS or GCP. Its just that doing so is much less confusing on GCP, hence better UX.
    - whoisjuan 7y ago
      > But an ugly UI that streamlines common patterns and has sane and unsurprising defaults has good UX. Yes. But that's not what I'm talking about (I'm a 9 to 5 designer so to keep my job I believe I need to have a strong enough foundation to not confuse UI and UX). A product can be ugly but still functional. For example, HackerNews is kind of ugly but it has a decent UX. GCP sometimes has decent UIs with horrible UX or horrible UX with horrible UIs. Of course, I'm speaking about web consoles. If we are going to talk about the whole developer experience (including the CLI, documentation, APIs, etc), I think it gets more complex than that. But as a user of both GCP and AWS, I think Google DX (developer experience) it's not great. Perhaps better in certain areas when compared to AWS, but not something that would deserve any praise.
jon-wood 7y ago
My theory on this is that the web console isn’t actually the real UX for cloud providers - their API is the UX, and the web console is just a thing that they fling in at the end because everything is meant to have one
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dglass 7y ago
Completely agree. GCP is confusing as hell to navigate. I don't need some polished up pretty looking UI. I need to be able to access my resources quickly and move around the dashboard easily. Things are scattered everywhere in GCP.
always_late 7y ago
There seems to be a common problem here, is it possible for a startup to come in and improve things.

maktouch 7y ago

In GCP, I çan see all my instances of all regions in one go. I can't do that with aws. In GCP, I can easily create networks between projects. It's really shitty to do in aws. In GCP, I can create a machine and everyone in my team automatically has ssh access. In GCP, I can make an instance, then mark the IP as reserved. In aws, I have to reserve the IP first. Aws UX is the worst. I use both on an everyday basis. I could go on and on..

whoisjuan 7y ago
It seems that you are talking about features. I never said that AWS UX isn't horrible. It is. But GCP is also pretty shitty. They don't deserve any praise in this area at all. They have useful features but that doesn't mean their UX is good.
- maktouch 7y ago
  Well, UX means user experience. If some little features give you a better experience to me, a user, isn't that a better UX? They both have regions. One makes it easier to see at a glance. They both have the concept of reserved IP, one doesn't need to be set first. They both install ssh keys for you. One does it per user, the other per instance. One sets up cross region VPC for you. The other one makes you suffer and do it yourself.
  - whoisjuan 7y ago
    Yeah, you're right. That's definitely a better UX. But since OP was talking about GCP UI as a potential value differentiator, I was also focusing on that. Certainly something like an easy VPC setup improves the overall experience within the platform. But I was referring to things like their documentation, the way they organize resources inside the Web Console and the confusing paths to different functionality within their UI.
  - redredrobot 7y ago
    Making it hard to cross regions is deliberate - I would guess it's a learning from s3 being designed as a global service. And I think if you compared global outages across cloud providers, you would see that strong region isolation has substantial benefits.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  It seems like you're confusing UI and UX. My experience with either UI is almost nil, so I can't comment, but an ugly UI that streamlines common patterns and has sane and unsurprising defaults has good UX. As far as I know, you can accomplish all of the things GP mentioned with either AWS or GCP. Its just that doing so is much less confusing on GCP, hence better UX.
  - whoisjuan 7y ago
    > But an ugly UI that streamlines common patterns and has sane and unsurprising defaults has good UX. Yes. But that's not what I'm talking about (I'm a 9 to 5 designer so to keep my job I believe I need to have a strong enough foundation to not confuse UI and UX). A product can be ugly but still functional. For example, HackerNews is kind of ugly but it has a decent UX. GCP sometimes has decent UIs with horrible UX or horrible UX with horrible UIs. Of course, I'm speaking about web consoles. If we are going to talk about the whole developer experience (including the CLI, documentation, APIs, etc), I think it gets more complex than that. But as a user of both GCP and AWS, I think Google DX (developer experience) it's not great. Perhaps better in certain areas when compared to AWS, but not something that would deserve any praise.

jon-wood 7y ago

My theory on this is that the web console isn’t actually the real UX for cloud providers - their API is the UX, and the web console is just a thing that they fling in at the end because everything is meant to have one

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

dglass 7y ago

Completely agree. GCP is confusing as hell to navigate. I don't need some polished up pretty looking UI. I need to be able to access my resources quickly and move around the dashboard easily. Things are scattered everywhere in GCP.

always_late 7y ago

There seems to be a common problem here, is it possible for a startup to come in and improve things.