3 ms·

AWS supports Windows too :) http://aws.amazon.com/windows/ http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

by buren 11y ago

ohitsdom 11y ago
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.
- boulos 11y ago
  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#premiumoperatingsystems https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#premiumoperatingsys... [1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/ 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.
  - ohitsdom 11y ago
    Good info, thanks!
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
      - boulos 11y ago
        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...

AWS supports Windows too :) http://aws.amazon.com/windows/ http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

by buren 11y ago

AWS supports Windows too :) http://aws.amazon.com/windows/ http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

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.

boulos 11y ago
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#premiumoperatingsystems https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#premiumoperatingsys... [1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/ 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.
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  Good info, thanks!
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
    - boulos 11y ago
      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...