The co-opetition among the world’s top cloud computing providers is becoming more pronounced.

Google Inc. kicked it up another notch today by adding support for two of Microsoft Corp.’s most important software products to its infrastructure-as-a-service platform. The first is Windows Server Core, a slimmed-down operating system that has relatively few components for hackers to target and is designed mainly to run sensitive management applications. It’s joined by the arguably even more significant addition of pre-configured SQL Server Enterprise Edition images.

Companies can now quickly deploy the popular database on the Google Cloud Platform and pay for their instances by the minute with everything included in the price. Alternatively, an organization that already uses SQL Server Enterprise may bring its existing licenses and subtract Microsoft’s software rental fees from their bill.

Either way, the databases instances in Google’s cloud will come equipped with all the bells and whistles that have made Microsoft’s database so popular. The search giant placed a particular emphasis on its support for the system’s administrative capabilities in today’s launch announcement. A company can take use SQL Server’s AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature to create copies of its deployment in multiple data centers and, should a problem occur, quickly redirect requests to one of the standbys.

Google’s decision to embrace the database and Windows Server Core comes as Microsoft also works to make its public cloud more open. Over the past few quarters, the company has added support for numerous Linux distributions ranging from developer favorites such as Debian and Ubuntu to RHEL, which directly competes with Windows Server in the enterprise market. It’s all part of an industry trend to provide organizations with more choice in how they use cloud infrastructure.

Image courtesy of Google