Microsoft Azure is an operating system for the “cloud”.

The closest comparison appears to be with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the “cloud” which is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. (ref. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ )

Microsoft Azure is a web-tier offering, for Windows in the Cloud and provides

• virtualized computation
• a shared storage system
• an automated service managment system

The Shared Storage system replicates data across many machines – possibly thousands.

Automated Service Management enables you to upgrade an application without bringing the system down.

Many developer tools are provided and include the “Cloud on a Desktop” which provides a simulation of the Windows Azure Cloud environment on your local machine. Tools extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running, and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure. Azure works with both managed and unmanaged code.

Find out more at

http://blogs.msdn.com/cloud/archive/2008/10/27/getting-started-windows-azure-tools-for-microsoft-visual-studio.aspx

A transcript from the Day 1 Keynote with Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and  Dave Thompson is available at

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/ozzie/10-27PDC08dayone.mspx

or watch the actual keynote in Media Player, from

http://wm.istreamplanet.com/customers/ms/300_ms_pdc_081027.asx

Windows 7 – spotted a pretty good article describing the features of Windows 7 so I don’t need to repeat it here. Windows 7  is the next operating system from Microsoft, due as a replacement for Windows Vista and scheduled for release probably some time in 2010.

http://technologizer.com/2008/10/28/windows7/

Other Links

**Azure Services Home Page: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

Azure Pricing and Licensing: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx

**PDC Session Recordings: https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/

PDC Home Page: http://microsoftpdc.com

PDC Press Home Page: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/pdc/default.mspx

**Windows Team Blog: http://windowsteamblog.com/

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5. Windows Mobile 5.0