Feb 02, 2017 01:49 AM EST By Erwin Castro, UniversityHerald Reporter

Google Cloud is making some big announcement that will lure customers who are using Windows platform in their IT data centers to the Google Cloud Platform. The search giant made the big announcement this week.

Google Launches New Cloud Offerings

According to TechCrunch, the Mountain View-based company has announced the availability of pre-configured images for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on the Google Cloud.

The moves mean only one thing-- IT pros can now launch pre-configured virtual machines running any of these products on Google Cloud Platform. They can also bring an existing SQL Server license.

In addition to the SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core, Google also announced support for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, which targets customers who are concerned about disaster recovery and high availability issues when running critical operations in a cloud setting.

Then and finally, all of the Windows Server images are now enabled with Windows Remote Management support, including the Windows Server Core 2016 and 2012 R2 images.

IT admins can check or visit Google Cloud websites for more information about this release. They can also check Windows on Google Cloud page and SQL Server on Google Cloud page for more other important updates.

Latest Moves Aimed At Microsoft's Core Business

As mentioned earlier by TechCrunch, the latest cloud moves takes aim at Microsoft customers with the new Windows VM offerings

Google Cloud Developer Tool, lead product manager Chris Sells said in a statement that this is just part of a much broader strategy to support Windows products on Google Cloud Platform. With these developments, Google is now ready to take on enterprise customers running these Windows-based products.

Sells also added that the latest cloud moves are just an extension of a much bigger effort that began last year when Google began supporting other Windows products such SQL Server 2008 and 2012.

Launched in 2011, Google Cloud Platform is a cloud computing service that offers hosting on the same supporting infrastructure that other Google services used.

The search giant's cloud service also provides a set of modular cloud-based services with a host of development tools, which include translations and prediction APIs, hosting and computing, cloud storage, and data storage.

Here are some of the main components of the Google Cloud Platform:

• Google Compute Engine is an IaaS service similar to Amazon EC2.
• Google App Engine is a PaaS service for directly hosting applications. This one is more similar to AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
• BigTable is an IaaS service that provides map reduce services, just like what Hadoop is doing these days.
• BigQuery is an IaaS service providing the columnar database. BigQuery works like Amazon Redshift.
• Google Cloud Functions, which still in alpha testing, is a FaaS service allowing functions to be triggered by events without developer resource management. Much like IBM OpenWhisk or Amazon Lambda.

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