Today Microsoft has officially announced their cloud computing platform and strategy.  They made the announcement at their Professional Developers Conference and also put up a new web site for Azure Services Platform at Azure.com.  If the term “cloud computing” is foreign to you, don’t despair because your not alone.  The good news is that cloud computing is slowly moving out of the fantasy land and into the reality land.

Last week Amazon announced they would be providing support for Windows and SQL Server on their Elastic Compute platform.  The Amazon approach is certainly different than the Microsoft approach. I’m not going to say one is better than the other because it just depends on what you want to accomplish.  With Amazon you need to start up and shutdown server instances yourself, while with Azure you have the ability to define the characteristics and requirements of the app and the platform will scale up/down instances as needed.  It sounds good in theory, but I’ll wait to see it before I vote

The Azure Services Platform comes with some SDKs and it will be easy for developers familiar with .NET development to build applications for the cloud. The Azure Services Platform is also very much focused on eliminating the complexity of building highly scalable, multi-tenant applications. If you’re an ISV that means you can focus on the business functionality instead of the technical details.

There are still questions I have about Azure Services Platform and the core services it provides, so I have some research to do. I’m downloading the SDKs and what ever other info I can find to see what this can do to help me.  So stay tuned!