A fair amount of my own confusion with GCP's offerings comes from their decision not to use proper names for their services.
AWS may have arbitrary names that don't follow any patterns, and Azure may have names that are grandiose, but at least you know with both of those clouds that they will always capitalize the name of all their service/product in documentation. There's no confusion if they are talking about a load balancer in the abstract, or their specific managed offerings.
Much the opposite. GCP's names are painfully transparent and banal. No need to look them up, you can tell what they do from their names (which are proper nouns, so it's clear they're a service name)
- Google Kubernetes Engine - runs Kubernetes clusters
- BigQuery - runs multi-billion row queries with ease
- Cloud Functions - FaaS run time
Now sure, Cloud Spanner is a DB, without DB in the name, so you'll have to read the docs for a few seconds, but let's compare that to Cognito (brains?), X-ray (medical imaging?), Kinesis (something to do with mitosis?).
My own frustration is not with the overall product line names. My frustration is when specific options of each product line are discussed in relation to each together in documentation.
Take the example of "GKE Ingress for HTTP(S) Load Balancing." It's overly generic and doesn't tell you at a quick glance whether you are buying a specific managed load balancer or running something yourself, and whether you are using basic exits to the public internet or buying into a global network accelerator.
Is there a single thing called Google Cloud Load Balancer? My understanding is that there are about half a dozen different managed load balancing services that all have very different operating characteristics. They all have very generic names in the docs like "global external HTTP(S) load balancer."
AWS may have arbitrary names that don't follow any patterns, and Azure may have names that are grandiose, but at least you know with both of those clouds that they will always capitalize the name of all their service/product in documentation. There's no confusion if they are talking about a load balancer in the abstract, or their specific managed offerings.