I moved from AWS EC2 to Google Cloud a few days ago. Google really seems to have beaten AWS, at least in pricing and flexibilty. On AWS (Singapore region) a 2-vCPU, 7.5G RAM instance costs $143/month (not including IOPS and bandwidth costs), while a similar one on GC works out to about $56/month. That's a massive difference. In addition, GC allows me to customize cores and RAM flexibly to a point, which is important for me.
Also, AWS's reserved instances are somewhat of a nightmare. There are only certain upgrade paths you can take, and you're locked in to them for a year. And if you're not in the US, you can't even sell the instance.
Yeah, I've seen multiple folks putting off reserved instance commitments and continuing to pay on-demand costs since they don't want to get locked in for a year. Its a serious commitment for smaller companies.
The No-Upfront reservation options that AWS last year helped narrow the difference quite a bit - but Google automatic discounts for sustained use are so much better and less complicated for users.
And per-minute billing, and the ability to move between zones month to month ("Oh, Haswell zone just launched? I'll be moving there..."). It's night and day, and if I could, I'd happily take the other side of any RI deal ;).
Also, AWS's reserved instances are somewhat of a nightmare. There are only certain upgrade paths you can take, and you're locked in to them for a year. And if you're not in the US, you can't even sell the instance.