Windows in a Google Cloud Platform world: this week on Google Cloud Platform



Google has a long and storied history running Linux, but Google Cloud Platform’s goal is to support a broad range of languages and tools. This week saw us significantly expand our support for the Microsoft ecosystem, with new support for ASP.NET, SQL Server, Powershell and the like.

If you have apps developed in .NET, Microsoft’s application development framework, you’ll be happy to learn that you can run them efficiently on GCP, with support for several flavors of Windows Server, an ASP.NET image in Cloud Launcher, pre-loaded SQL Server images on Google Compute Engine, and a variety of Google APIs available for the .NET platform. And thanks to a new integration with Microsoft Visual Studio, the popular integrated development environment, developers in the Microsoft ecosystem can easily access that functionality from the comfort of their IDE.

But it’s not just about Google broadening its horizons. Microsoft, too, is taking its offerings outside of its traditional confines. This week, Microsoft open-sourced Powershell, the command-line shell and scripting language for .NET, so that developers can use it to automate and administer Linux apps and environments, not just Windows ones.

And Kubernetes, Google’s open-source container management system, is also finding its way over to Microsoft’s Azure public cloud, thanks to its ability to provide a lingua franca for hosting and managing container-based environments. Check out this blog post about provisioning Azure Kubernetes infrastructure to see just how far things have come.