Sounds like textbook anti-competitive behavior. Unfortunately cloud is super sticky, MS knows this will force folks to Azure and even if it gets thrown out in court the customers won't be able to move back easily.

If competition was working well a product like teams would have been forced to become much better or it would have died.

(FD: I made a submission recently that was very pro GCP... I promise I'm not a shill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41648371).

I used to run Windows Server for The Division and Division 2 gameservers and honestly we got completely fucked by this.

I made a slide once that showcased the high cost of licensing on GCP compared to bare-metal, and BYOL (bring-your-own-license) was explicitly forbidden by Microsoft for cloud.

Here's the slides: https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/devfest2019-msv.pdf slide 35 is what you're after.

Nobody sane runs Windows on the server, and Ubisoft has now completed the multi-year arduous task of porting Snowdrop to Linux (ironically, largely because of Stadia- another Google thing). As has Sharkmob (my former employer) and RENNSPORT (my current employer). Though it cost us 6 months of work, and is thus far my most controversial decision as CTO.

To be completely clear here: our infrastructure spend was millions of dollars, 30% of that was direct to Microsoft, a fee that would not have existed had we used Azure.

As an example: I was looking at remote desktop hosting at work once. Azure lists no pricing; they give you a calculator that has about 40 knobs you can tweak, and it doesn't include the cost of software licenses. Oh wait, software licenses? Shouldn't Microsoft just bundle the cost of the Windows licenses into the cost of hosting Windows? Yeah, you'd think so, but no! Azure remote desktop is actually all BYOL (bring your own license) and you need to either buy special Enterprise SKU licenses (E5/E7 AFAIK) that Microsoft only sells through resellers (at twice the cost of a normal Windows client license[0]) or have all your employees on Windows volume keys that somehow magically license the VMs when they connect to their remote desktop (which... defeats the point of remote desktop).

On AWS they just list pricing for people with their own Windows licenses and people who want to buy a license through AWS. All the licensing costs are bundled into the monthly cost of the VM and they list fairly straightforward performance, RAM, and storage tiers for those VMs. It was at least enough information to inform me that remote desktop was a fool's errand no matter how much it might fix other IT problems. The Azure pricing assumes you're already so deep into the Microsoft ecosystem that you're mainlining volume license keys like heroin and Microsoft has your bank account details on speed-dial.

[0] If you don't want to mess about with separate VMs per user and want, say, Windows Server with a bunch of people signed into one VM, then the licensing costs double again. I would REALLY like to know what would motivate someone to want shared hardware so much that they'd pay twice as much for the Windows licenses over separate machines.

But it could be worse. While we were basically able to do anything we wanted with our internal lab AWS accounts with no questions asked, the one thing we had to get permission for was to stand up RDS/Oracle instances

Let's file more of those complaints!

When will I be able to get Spanner on Azure or AWS or my own hardware?

Isn't this anti competitive from gcp?

As a senior Azure architect. We try to run as much as possible on Linux to avoid licenses. I don't even understand how you end up running Windows Server on GCP. Never ever heard of a corp that does this. Also, most of the new stuff from MS is platform independent.