Redmond says that the G series can provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud.

If the stats Microsoft has released to support its claim to be cloud king are correct, then it starts to look like Redmond really is putting the fear of the gods into its rivals.

Amazon Web Services' i2.8xlarge and r3.8xlarge EC2 instances can claim 32 CPUs, but they are older Xeons and have t less RAM than Microsoft, at a mere 244GB.

Google's n1-highcpu-16 instance has 16 vCPUs. Rackspace tops out at 120GB of storage, but can manage 32 Xeon v3 CPUs. SoftLayer tops out at 16CPUs and 64GB of RAM. VMware's vCloud Air does things a little differently as it lets one buy bundles of compute, storage and memory, claims “virtually unlimited” resources and also offers monthly bundles with 30Ghz CPU capacity. That is less than what one can expect from 32 Xeon v3 cores.

All up it is looking like Microsoft is going to become a serious contender in the cloud space in a way that cannot be matched by its rivals.