The Cloud
Google Stadia: The Cloud and the Client
My earliest network gaming experience was playing Netrek in a campus computer lab.
Choosing a cloud provider can be a difficult process that has long-term impacts to productivity, cost, and features.
Choosing a cloud provider can be a difficult process that has long-term impacts to productivity, cost, and features. Do you select based on your existing environment's Microsoft investment and go with Azure? Do you use the largest provider, Amazon Web Services(AWS)? Or do you choose the newest provider, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?
Since GCP is the newer than the other big providers, you might not be as familiar with what it has to offer. So below I'll highlight some of the advantages of GCP to help you choose the best cloud provider for you.
1. Competitive pricing. At first glance, GCP might seem like a bit of an underdog. Despite being launched in 2008, GCP has been slow to get market traction. But rather than an underdog, GCP is actually more like a dark horse—the unexpected contender rapidly gaining ground. GCP is releasing competitive pricing that can beat Azure and AWS on many fronts, including IOPS, and medium-term instance costs. See the graph below from kinsta.com using percentage of Stack overflow questions per month.
2. The best free tier. Getting started on GCP can be cheaper than AWS or Azure. While all three offer a free tier, I have found the GCP free tier is the most generous, allowing you lots of features to experiment with.
3. Robust infrastructure. GCP Uses Google. It can’t be stressed enough that Google and all its resources run GCP. The same internet backbone, the same machine learning tools, the same load balancers that Google uses, are available in GCP. This gives you proven infrastructure that is used every day for billions of users.
Bottom line: GCP has some unique advantages that can make it a smart choice, depending on your use case. If cost-control is your top concern or you want to experiment with a free tier that can’t be beat, then Google Cloud Platform may be the right choice for you.