Hardly a surprise. From what i have heard, it sounds like Google's internal use of GCP is mostly automated, using internal apis. I.e. it sounds like are not clicking through the screens, or even using the external version of the APIs. I question if the externally available screens are even capable of handling some of the special permissions that google internal workloads can be given.
This is in contrast to say Azure, where plenty of Microsoft employees are using the same resource manager APIs and even using the portal. I think even the billing related features get used as part of internal budgeting (they want teams to try to keep resource utilization reasonable). While teams developing parts of azure itself may be utilizing internal APIs (for example Microsoft Graph is basically just a giant wrapper around a variety of internal APIs), most of the rest of the company sees and interacts with azure in the same way we do. (Except that they also have access to dogfood/PPE environments that we don't, such that endpoints for say integration tests don't need to run on production azure).
It's true enough, but it never really felt like teams solicited feedback on their APIs or portal UX. Azure really only made this jump to using all public products internally recently; even the CI systems used by internal teams were proprietary until recent pushes to move to an ADO-centric model.
I'm also not certain that Azure really has the right internal pressures to produce great UX results. In my experience Azure's culture internally is very lackadaisical with only a few teams really pushing the platform forward.
As a power GCP user, I see them running UX studies all the time. Having been using GCP for the last decade, the UX updates feel like day and night changes. Frankly I find the AWS console a lot creekier.
> This is in contrast to say Azure, where plenty of Microsoft employees are using the same resource manager APIs and even using the portal. [...]
And still they don't have this incredible complicated and not understandable IAM. Most user I know just give everyone root because it's not possible to just allow some specific API operations for a specific set of credentials. Or maybe I am to AWS.
This is in contrast to say Azure, where plenty of Microsoft employees are using the same resource manager APIs and even using the portal. I think even the billing related features get used as part of internal budgeting (they want teams to try to keep resource utilization reasonable). While teams developing parts of azure itself may be utilizing internal APIs (for example Microsoft Graph is basically just a giant wrapper around a variety of internal APIs), most of the rest of the company sees and interacts with azure in the same way we do. (Except that they also have access to dogfood/PPE environments that we don't, such that endpoints for say integration tests don't need to run on production azure).