Google’s shiny new toys for nerds only: DNS, Linux/Windows support, & virtual machines

SAN FRANCISCO — At a cloud event today, Google announced it was cutting its cloud-services prices by huge margins — up to 85 percent in some cases. But that’s not all the good news.

Google also announced general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Linux SUSE on the Google Cloud Platform. It’s beginning to support Windows, with preview support coming for Windows Server 2008 R2.

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And it premiered the Google Cloud DNS service — which is comparable to the Amazon cloud’s Route 53 DNS service, which came out in 2010. Google also introduced managed virtual machines, whcih brings the simplicity of management from the Google App Engine — a platform as a service — onto the Google Compute Engine, an IaaS.

Also, the company launched the BigQuery Streaming service to analyze data as it comes in, with support for up to 100,000 incoming rows of data per second. The service is similar to the new Kinesis service on Amazon’s cloud.

Google Compute Engine became generally available in December. Since then, Google has introduced new features, but it has been slow to announce big customer wins.

Today, infrastructure chief Urs Hölzle called out a few big companies using services within the Google Cloud Platform, including Netflix and Airbnb — both flagship users of Google cloud competitor Amazon Web Services. Airbnb uses Google’s Translate API, Hölzle said.