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TopInterestingly, there is a significant similarity between many cloud providers (Sultan, 2010). The standard offerings like VM instances, elasticity, monitoring, logging, networking, etc. are just that, standard. Where the various cloud providers start to diverge is in the specialty offerings, like Google’s Vision service, and AWS RedShift. On those sorts of items, there is real value in choosing one provider over the other. For the commodity offerings, there are several distinctions on the tooling and SDK front, but not enough of an advantage is noticed between them to make any real difference (Amazon, n.d.; Google, n.d.).
2.1 Instance Types
Here we have VMs, Container Service and Lambda, for all three providers, and more or less the same OS, Compute, Memory, GPU and Disk customization options. Compute is a true commodity with a few exceptions. GPU/APU can vary insofar as chaining options and types (Sandbu, 2017). Further, the mechanisms for managing compute instances and compute clusters, and the means for networking the same can vary. But at the end of the day, there is no meaningful difference in cost or performance. There is statistically meaningful difference showing that AWS is faster insofar as latency and compute dedication, but not a practical operational meaningfulness (Patrizio, 2019).
2.2 Development Environment (SDKs)
Many developers prefer to do the majority of their work from the CLI. We are simply more productive when we don’t have to open a GUI for every task (Computer Hope, 2018). The majority of common management tasks, including provisioning, deployment, scaling, etc. can be achieved via the CLI tooling offered by all major providers. To this end, we can see having a complete CLI/SDK is, in fact, a commodity. AWS is one of the most complete CLIs (Amazon, n.d.). AWS more or less offers CLI management and interaction for all services and projects. The AWS CLI is complete, simple and highly intuitive making it an excellent resource for DevOps engineers. The gcloud CLI is also very complete, but the documentation is a little harder to follow (Google, n.d.-b). The gcloud CLI does have an interesting adaptation in that it is pre-loaded into the web-based command line tooling launchable from the gcloud web interface. We found the web CLI to be a very useful feature and it saves the user from having to be on a machine with the CLI installed to work on their IaaS hosted by GCP.