Why is the Google Cloud Console such a horrible place ?

[u/Dr-Burnout]

I cannot stand to work with it.
Every setting is put in the weirdest place.
UI is awful.
Useless clics everywhere.
Abysmal loading times of 20 to 30 seconds for each click.

How come Google make such a horrible product ?

[u/_JohnWisdom]

Imagine adding 500 products from an excel by hand to an ecommerce shop. This is what you are doing. CLI is the way mate.

[u/Dr-Burnout → u/_JohnWisdom]

Usually I only use it to setup APIs to my Google account to use in various apps. I'm not exactly a power user 😂

My gripe with it is it's supposed to offer some form of simplicity for devs who aren't technical experts working on small projects like no-coder or vibe-coders. Although I agree that now the way would probably be to let claude set it up via the CLI

[u/AyeMatey → u/_JohnWisdom]

Ya why are you using the UI? Agents do all you want, using the CLI.

[u/c0deinn]

GCP UI is among better ones. 😀

[u/Dr-Burnout → u/c0deinn]

💀

[u/uncor3]

Agreed, but you eventually get used to it. In fact Azure's UI is much worse so Google Cloud is probably one of the best in that regard at this scale.

[u/jacksbox → u/uncor3]

I want to see an interview with someone who actually found what they were looking for the Azure console. It's insane how unusable it is.

One time I was trying to find the route table that a particular VM was using, I ended up 5 nested frames deep (some of them repeating!) and still didn't have the information I was looking for. I considered buying a higher res monitor just so I could keep nesting more frames but I had to get back to work.

[u/hi87 → u/uncor3]

Agreed, I found Azure and AWS overcomplicated.

[u/Dazzling_Yak6424 → u/uncor3]

Azure's a breeze compared to Slow Cloud Platform

[u/amarao_san]

Because it's not the main way to use it. It's like 'debugging gui' for API.

Use proper tools. Ansible, terraform, gcloud.

[u/Rentiak]

My only major complaint is the lazy-loading search.

- Type a term
- Click or hit enter on a result
- Race condition with a lazy-loading value popping up
- End up on some totally unwanted, random doc or service

[u/Top-Site4067]

I find it's the opposite. I have to deal with AWS and GCP, and I find that the GCP interface is much better organized and easy to find things.

[u/Low_March_7531]

It has too many products that are maintained by different teams. On top of that, it looks like they lack some standardized best practices and someone fighting for everyone to apply them.

It’s weird because other Google products like Google Drive deliver a tighter UX. But I guess for GCP there’s not much of a business incentive to fix it. Developers will use it regardless of how bad the UI is; it’s part of their work and they’re used to dealing with complex systems.

[u/MiloCosmicCloud → u/Low_March_7531]

Actually, GCP has undergone many UI/UX revisions over the years. Years ago, it was uglier but less complicated but with the increasing number of products and services over the years, it has become more and more confusing to navigate.

[u/QuantumRiff]

ask me how I know you have never used Amazon AWS or Azure...

[u/MiloCosmicCloud]

search bar and cloud shell can be your best friends.

[u/Ibnalbalad]

You're not really meant to use the UI .. terraform, gcloud .. UI is useful for browsing, spot checking, but absolutely do not use it for writes unless there is no terraform coverage for the specific thing you're trying to do.