No, but it doesn't do hourly billing so it can still be cheaper depending on your workload.

Also, you tend to be getting more per instance hour on both Azure and GCE, assuming you do things those environments are good at. In Azure's case if you can get your software running on windows then it's actually quite good performance for I/O intensive things.

Why Windows? You can run Linux on Azure

So... I haven't checked in the last 6 months but when I did do a comparison the Windows vms were noticably faster than the linux vms.

I should check that again, it's been awhile.

But it depends on your platform. Its an unpopular but somewhat verifiable fact that the Windows kernels have much more powerful async I/O support and when software targets that, it is very fast compared to linux counterparts. If your toolkit supports this, then a strong argument can be made that you don't really care so long as SSH works. Powershell is serviceable for maintenance and most deploys are fairly agnostic to other aspects of the platform.

I've been doing skunkworks projects. I tried to get some stuff working in GCE and their docs are a mess and it never worked. Azure has some warts in its git push deploy stuff, but it worked the first time and I managed to diagnose the other issues.

> Windows kernels have much more powerful async I/O

async DISK I/O

Network as well, under certain expectations.

The spot pricing seems to go up pretty quickly if you try to run more than one instance.

I've run 6 of those GPU instances for $0.60ish/hr.

Pricing does go up near computer vision conference deadlines though. Many research labs are too poor to buy our own hardware. :-)