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I'm always surprised that comparisons like this with AWS miss the fundamental philosophical approach of the cloud offerings.

AWS is "infrastructure as a service". Hosts, network switches, load balancers - things that historically cost an arm and a leg, but they could virtualize. Add some elasticity and auto scaling, and you've got the foundation to build anything else on top.

The hyper-specificity of SQS vs Kinesis, for example, comes out of the same philosophy: Provide the infrastructure, and let customers figure out what to build on top of it.

Google, meanwhile, started with AppEngine - run your apps in the cloud without concern for the hardware. AWS's equivalent is Elastic Bean Stalk - more than one layer of abstraction higher than the default offerings.




Google may have started with AppEngine, but that's not how it is today.

Google now has a line-up of products directly competing with equivalent AWS services: VMs (Compute Engine), queueing (Pub/sub), key/value storage (GCS, which even has S3 API compatibility), SQL databases (CloudSQL, Spanner), Redis, document storage (Google Datastore), distributed file system (Filestore, like EFS), big data store (BigQuery), etc.




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