Windows on the rise at GCP

It’s been a little over three months since we made our no-charge VM migration tool available for GCP in the Google Cloud Console, and customers have jumped at the chance to move their enterprise workloads to Google Cloud. While customers are moving applications using a variety of source operating systems to Google Cloud, we've been especially excited to see that almost half of the VM migrations to Google Cloud via this new service have been of Microsoft Windows workloads.

Why is this significant to you? Because our goal to make Google Cloud the best place to run any application — from Windows workloads to new cloud native applications. We believe that the significant number of Windows applications migrating to Google Cloud through this new service is indicative of strong demand to give enterprise Windows applications the agility, scale and security advantages of Google Cloud.

We're happy to see customers take advantage of our first class support for Windows, SQL Server and both .NET and .NET Core on GCP. We’ve made sure that those applications are well-supported by providing support for Windows Server 2016 within weeks of it reaching GA, by adding support for SQL Server Web, Standard and Enterprise editions (including support for High Availability), by integrating Visual Studio and PowerShell, by making all of Google’s APIs available via NuGet and by joining the .NET Foundation’s Technical Steering Committee. Further, with Stackdriver Logging, Error Reporting and Trace support for Windows and .NET; developers and administrators have the support they need to build, deploy and manage their applications. Finally, with the recent announcement of .NET Core support in all of our libraries and tooling, as well as in our App Engine and Container Engine products, you’re covered into the future as well.

Internally, we’ve seen other signs of more Windows and .NET workloads running on GCP, including a 57% increase in Windows CPU usage in the second half of 2016. Further, we know that sometimes you need help to take advantage of the full capabilities of GCP, which is why we announced the Windows Partner Program. These top-notch systems integrators will help you to not just “lift & shift,” but rather to “move & improve,” with cutting-edge capabilities such as big data processing, data analytics, machine learning and container management.

Learn more about Windows, SQL Server and .NET on GCP; and don’t hesitate to reach out with questions and suggestions. We’ve had lots of folks make the switch already, we’d love you to join them. Our migration service is offered at no charge and you get $300 of GCP credits when you sign up so you can migrate a few servers to see how easy it is to run your windows apps in GCP. Click here to get started.