In the world of Microsoft Cloud computing, Microsoft announced and released its Azure services platform.  Essentially it is providing MS products in a cloud environment as a direct competitor to Google.  Unbeknownst to myself, the city of Washington D.C. actually migrated a lot, and possibly all, of their office-esque applications to Google.  Innovative and daring I should say.   Is the TCO for such an endeavor lower than paying MS licensing fees and paying for the supporting infrastructure? I am not sure but I would think that it is pretty even.

Back to Azure.  It enables you to deploy customized Windows instances (customized in that they are specially built for Azure) to Microsoft’s cloud platform.  Once deployed you can use .NET, SQL, LIVE, SharePoint and CRM services.  That is a pretty nice stack and we are anxious to see how the features work out.  Not surprisinginly, the instances will also support Rails, PHP and be tightly integrated with Visual Studio. I have not seen any pricing information or any SLAs so I would not start migrating any apps until all of this bakes for a bit.

From MS Azure Site:

Windows Azure

Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage internet or cloud applications. Windows Azure supports a consistent development experience through its integration with Visual Studio. In the early stages of CTP, .NET managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Learn more about Windows Azure.

Live Services

Live Services is a set of building blocks within the Azure Services Platform for handling user data and application resources. Live Services provides developers with an easy on-ramp to build rich social applications and experiences, across a range of digital devices that can connect with one of the largest audiences on the Web.

Learn more about Live Services

Microsoft SQL Services

Microsoft SQL Services extends the capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server into the cloud as a Web-based, distributed relational database. It provides Web services that enable relational queries, search, and data synchronization with mobile users, remote offices and business partners. It can store and retrieve structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

Learn more about SQL Services

Microsoft .NET Services

Microsoft .NET Services make developing loosely coupled cloud-based applications easier. .NET Services includes access control to help secure your applications, a service bus for communicating across applications and services, and hosted workflow execution. These hosted services allow you to easily create federated applications that span from on-premises environments to the cloud.

Learn more about .NET Services

Microsoft® SharePoint® Services & Dynamics® CRM Services

In the future, developers will have access to SharePoint & CRM functionality for collaboration and building stronger customer relationships. With the flexibility to use familiar developer tools like Visual Studio, developers will be able to rapidly build applications that utilize SharePoint and CRM capabilities as developer services for their own applications. Developers can expect a breadth of SharePoint & CRM capabilities across the spectrum of on-premises, online & the Azure Services Platform.