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.
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.
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...
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.