A plain-English guide to moving compute from Google Cloud to AWS: VMs, instance groups, Spot, GKE, GPUs, TPUs and batch. What replaces what, what behaves differently, what changes on the bill, and a step-by-step plan.

"Compute" is the part of the cloud that runs your code: virtual machines, Kubernetes nodes, GPU machines and batch jobs. When a team moves from Google Cloud (GCP) to AWS, compute is usually the first thing they plan.

Teams move for simple reasons. The rest of the company is already on AWS. A company they bought came with an AWS account. Their credits ran out on one cloud and started on the other. Or the data they need already lives in AWS.

Most teams start with a table: Compute Engine goes to EC2, GKE goes to EKS, GPUs go to GPUs. That table is a good start, but it hides the real work. Services that do the same job often behave a little differently.…