Google today announced the general availability of Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems on the Google Compute Engine public cloud.
The news follows the arrival of Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition on the Google cloud in December.
“With its graduation to General Availability, Windows Server instances are now covered by the Compute Engine SLA,” product manager Alex Gaysinsky wrote in a blog post today. “Windows Server users can now easily deploy a server running Active Directory or ASP.NET using the Cloud Launcher, and can securely extend their existing infrastructure into Google Cloud Platform using VPN.”
This isn’t huge news, not least because of the beta news a few months ago. More generally, Microsoft has been all over Linux for its public cloud, and Google, being the ever unafraid competitor, is moving swiftly to support Windows workloads on its own cloud. Of course, both Google and Microsoft are trailing behind public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services and therefore need to be able to check all the boxes, including having a wide range of operating systems available.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is working on Windows Server 2016, with features such as Nano Server and Windows Containers.
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