Basically what your saying, is what I’ve been feeling for awhile about AWS. It looks fantastic when presented but when you actually go to use it the complexities and costs soak up your time and money like the desert soaks up moisture. You keep putting in time and money, and keep seeing almost nothing come out of it. Unless your spending thousands it felt like I was running software on a raspberry pi over 56k dialup. Thousands a month later got me to the equivalent performance of my rather mediocre laptop. Astoundingly bad for the amount of money and time put in.

GCP actually looks like its performant for the price tag, provides features that actually work well, and keeps complexities down. I might give it a shot after all.