

Bringing Windows Server to Google Cloud Platform - Sami_Lehtinen
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/07/Bringing-Windows-to-Google-Cloud-Platform.html

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ohitsdom
As a .NET developer, very happy to see more competition for Azure.

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buren
AWS supports Windows too :)
[http://aws.amazon.com/windows/](http://aws.amazon.com/windows/)

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ohitsdom
Yeah I thought about including AWS in my comment :) but I feel that Azure is
the default choice for .NET cloud platforms so I (and I think many Windows
devs) benchmark Google/Amazon against Azure.

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boulos
One important distinction between AWS and GCE is price.

GCE and Azure both have per-minute pricing while AWS is hourly (which matters
a lot for build bots or scaling up and down your website). GCE even charges
for Windows per-minute and at a lower rate than AWS ($.04/vCPU/hour vs
$.063/vCPU/hour) [0] that matches the "Windows" price on Azure [1]
($.04/vCPU/hour on the A7 "Standard tier" VMs).

[0]
[https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#premiumoperatingsys...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#premiumoperatingsystems)

[1] [http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-
mac...](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/)

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine, but not on anything related to this
Windows support.

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MichaelGG
We switched to GCE because of two main things:

1\. Speed. _Everything_ is faster on GCE. From the not-terrible portal, to VM
start times, to the machines themselves and storage.[1]

2\. Price. Google was a half to a fifth of the price of Azure. Even with an
Azure enterprise agreement GCE was far better.

Great job. I didn't think I'd like a Google product, and I came in very biased
against Google, but you totally won me and others over thru a flatly superior
product.

1: Azure still has an embarrassingly bad SSD story. Even when talking to them
they don't seem to realize what a useless offering they have. I guess their
plan is to focus on software on top of Azure, cause as IaaS it's simply not
competitive.

~~~
ohitsdom
The one thing I'm confused about with Google is what product do I select if I
want a server to host a website on? Azure has the smallest VM at around
$13/month, and on that I can host a website, database, services, etc. Does
Google have a similar option? GCE's setup and pricing doesn't seem geared
towards that.

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boulos
Are you just looking to have a single VM running Windows Server?

We definitely have individual VMs that cost less than that (the f1-micro would
be about $5/month for the VM, the g1-small about $13/month). You can hook them
up to Autoscaling, Google Cloud DNS and Google Cloud Load Balancing (which
Azure's "Basic tier" VMs don't seem to support; I'm not familiar with them,
just reading what it says).

That said, I'm not sure I'd try to run Windows server on such a small instance
(we apparently allow it and only charge $.02/hr in those cases). For example,
Chrome's Clusterfuzz team runs Windows bots using the n1-standard-2 (2 vCPUs
and ~8 GiB of RAM). Maybe someone can comment as to whether Nano Server would
improve this situation...

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sudioStudio64
Embrace, extend, and wait, whut?

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nivla
Are you extending this phrase to Google or are you seriously accusing
Microsoft for letting Google use their product?

It really surprises me out of all places HN has users who default to
commenting based on a regex of keywords. Doesn't matter the context, does the
article have (Windows|Microsoft) let me throw in a comment about embrace,
extend, and extinguish and nothing more that adds value to the discussion. It
is sad to find out that even Reddit has grown past it.

~~~
sudioStudio64
I was joking dude. It was a joke because people always put that in any post
about Microsoft. So, it was sarcasm.

But way to be a tool about it.

~~~
nivla
Then put a sarcasm tag on it or write it such a way that it is obvious it is a
joke. The fact you received a few downvotes for it implies that there were
others who took it more as a snark than a joke. Keep in mind, this is HN,
people come here for serious discussions (although subjectable), so it is hard
to get away with a joke, especially a one that adds little or none to the
discussion.

