I am also a cloud consultant focused on AWS and a former employee of AWS ProServe (I have no love lost for the company).

But if you are a consultant, why pray tell are you spending that much time in the console except for occasional monitoring? Everything is either CLI commands or infrastructure as code.

And the issue with Google in particular is their customer support and business enterprise go to market sucks. The sales guys at ProServe use to run circles around GCP and never really took them seriously or had talking points. For big contracts we mostly had to compete with Azure because big boring enterprise was already using Microsoft.

When we did have to compete against GCP - and their sales team didn’t blow up the deal themselves - we just had to say “do you really want to trust Google with your workloads? Look at their history of abandoning products and raising prices”

Apple is a customer of all of the big cloud providers and was on stage at last year’s reinvent.

AWS throws money and people at startups. I’ve been on three sides - working at a 60 person startup who hosted on AWS, working at ProServe and now a third party consulting company where many deals come about because of AWS funding.