Bringing Windows Server to Google Cloud Platform
googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com
googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com
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...
[1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-mac...
Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine, but not on anything related to this Windows support.
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.
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...
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.
But way to be a tool about it.
I thought it was funny, ya know, because it's about Microsoft, but its really about Google...it was a joke.
EDIT: And I'm sticking by it. That was funny.
I really can't believe that it didn't come across as a joke either. You guys can't possibly have thought that I was trying to write embrace, extend, and extinguish and then realized all of a sudden that it didn't fit in this case?
You guys need to lighten up.
EDIT: Yep. It was funny and you guys need to come off your fucking high horses or you're just as bad as the "Embrace,exten,blah blah blah" kid.