[jtokoph]

I've been using AWS for years, but the recent downtime for GCE got me to take a look at what Google was offering. (Makes no sense right? All publicity is good publicity?)

I was blown away by the UX of both the console and the instances themselves. Example: when you add a new user/public key in the console, it propagates to instances automatically. Sure, you could do that yourself, but the default features are just really nice to have.

[xorgar831]

You have to run their images however, but yeah, that's a nice feature esp. if your org uses GA already.

[waych]

For users that are using their own images, we also provide source for all our customization to the images so you can integrate functionality into yours as required.

The code used on Linux to integrate the OS with the platform for ssh keys, startup script, auto-expanding root-disk, etc: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-package...

For Windows, ssh keys aren't supported, however the platform has password reset built-in and starter scripts via metadata are also supported. Here's the code for the Windows agent: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-windows

If running Windows, you will also need device drivers: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-windows-drive...