On this episode of if/else, host Mayuko Inoue explores a choice faced by independent developers and large companies alike: which cloud platform will best suit their needs now, and in the future? There are several companies offering services in the cloud computing space, but we’re going to focus on two of the more high-profile platforms: Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. You’ll get a quick backgrounder on these two options, and you’ll hear from several developers about what they like and dislike about each one. You’ll also meet Justin. Justin is a senior developer at a large company, but he’s also working independently on his own app. He’s weighing the pros and cons of AWS and GCP for his specific needs, particularly the learning curve and cost of each platform. To help Justin decide on which might work best for his app, we’ve enlisted the help of two cloud computing experts. Charity Majors is a co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io. She used AWS to spin up the infrastructure for her company and knows the platform inside out. Daniel Compton is the founder of Deps, a private Maven repository service. He is also the project leader of Clojurists Together. He is using GCP for several of his projects. Charity and Daniel join Mayuko to explore the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and to give Justin - and anyone else facing this important decision - some real-world perspectives on each option. They also discuss the fascinating topic of innovation tokens.