ABSTRACT

Cloud computing has become increasingly important over the years, as the need for computational resources, data storage, and networking capabilities in the field of information technology has been increased. There are several large corporations that offer these services to small companies or to end-users such as GCP, AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and many more. The main aim of this thesis is to perform the comparison of GCP and AWS consoles in terms of the user interface while performing tasks related to compute engine. The cognitive walkthrough has been performed on tasks such as the creation of VPC, creation of VM instances, and launching them and then from the results, both the interfaces are compared using usability heuristics.

Background: As the usage of cloud computing has increased over the years, the companies that are offering these services have grown eventually. Though there are many cloud services available in the market the user might always choose the services that are more flexible and efficient to use. In this manner, the choice of our research is made to compare the cloud services in terms of user interaction user experience. As we dig deep into the topic of user interaction and experience there are evaluation techniques and principles such as cognitive walkthrough and usability heuristics are suitable for our research. Here the comparison is made among GCP and AWS user interfaces while performing some tasks related to compute engine.

Objectives: The main objectives of this thesis are to create VPC, VM instances,s and launch VM instances in two different cloud services such as GCP and AWS. To find out the best user interface among these two cloud services from the perspective of the user.

Method: The process of finding best user interface among GCP and AWS cloud services is based on the cognitive walkthrough and comparing with usability heuristics. The cognitive walkthrough is performed on chosen tasks in both the services and then compared using usability heuristics to get the results of our research.

Results: The results that are obtained from cognitive walkthrough and comparison with usability heuristics shown in graphical formats such as bar graphs, pie charts, and the comparison results are shown in the form of tabular form. The results cannot be universal, as they are just observational results from cognitive walkthrough and usability heuristic evaluation.

Conclusion: After performing the above-mentioned methods it is observed that the user interface of GCP is more flexible and efficient in terms of user interaction and experience. Though the user experience may vary based on the experience level of users in cloud services, as per our research the novice user and moderate users have chosen GCP as a better interactive system over AWS.

Keywords: Cloud computing, VM instance, Cognitive walkthrough, Usability heuristics, User-interface.