I was reading a Hacker News thread for an article comparing GCP to some alternatives like AWS. I’ve been a GCP user for a good while now, and it’s definitely my go-to public cloud. We also use it at my dayjob at Osmos.

Reading the article and comments got me thinking about some of my favorite GCP features. GCP has a few excellent gems which are better than pretty much any competing cloud offering:

  • Cloud Run. Best way to deploy containers hands down. All of the benefits of a serverless/containerized workload with all the ease of a traditional VPS deployment. Extremely cheap (pay $0 for side projects with little traffic).

  • BigQuery. Very easy to use with immense power without having to deal with the details yourself. Billing can be either extremely cheap or rather expensive depending on what you’re doing, though.

  • GCS Archive Storage. 1/3 the cost of glacier for storage ($0.0012/GB/Month lol), but more for retrieval. Has none of the annoyances of Glacier (you can download your files instantly, upload using normal APIs). Perfect for extremely cheap backups.

  • Cloud Spanner. I’ve not had a reason to use this yet myself, but there really aren’t any comparable offerings that I know of.