AWS vs. GCP: A Practical Checklist for Your First Cloud Migration

Feature comparisons between AWS and GCP mostly cancel out — both can run almost anything you'd want to build. The decision that actually matters is less about capability and more about fit: your team's existing skills, your workload shape, and what you're optimizing for in year one.

Start with what your team already knows

If your engineers have deep AWS experience, GCP's superior tooling in a specific area rarely offsets the ramp-up cost of relearning IAM, networking, and deployment patterns from scratch. The reverse is just as true. Migrating to "the objectively better platform" while your team learns it from zero is usually slower and more expensive than staying where their expertise already is.

Look at your workload shape, not just your workload type

A steady, predictable traffic pattern behaves differently across providers' pricing models than a spiky one. If your usage is highly variable, get real quotes modeled against your actual traffic curves rather than comparing list prices — reserved-instance and committed-use discounts change the picture substantially and unevenly between the two.

Data gravity matters more than compute

If you're already using a GCP-specific data service heavily, moving compute to AWS while your data stays on GCP adds latency and egress costs that erode whatever you were trying to save. The same logic applies in reverse for teams already invested in AWS's data stack. Migrate the data layer last, or not at all, unless there's a specific reason to move it.

A migration checklist worth actually using

• Inventory what you depend on today that's provider-specific — these are the expensive parts to move, not the compute.
• Get a cost estimate modeled on your actual last 3 months of traffic, not a generic calculator.
• Pick one non-critical service to migrate first and run it in parallel for a few weeks before committing further.
• Budget real time for retraining, not just infrastructure cost — this is usually the line item that gets underestimated.

There's rarely a universally "right" answer between the two. There's a right answer for your team, your existing stack, and your traffic pattern — and it's worth spending a week confirming that before committing to a migration that's expensive to reverse.