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Microsoft will offer Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services for purchase through a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume. Microsoft partners also will benefit from special promotional offers and discounts that will help enable partners to bring solutions to market faster, reduce IT complexity, and increase revenue opportunities.

(InformationWeek) Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud is a place you send your applications to in order to run them. Microsoft's Azure cloud is a place you go to in order to build your applications. In the process, you are very likely to use Visual Studio, the .Net Framework, SQL Server in the form of SQL Azure, and Microsoft SharePoint, then run the resulting cloud application in Azure itself.

(CRN) Azure pricing will be "very competitive" with existing cloud-based application development offerings and will employ a consumption-based business model. Customers have been very clear that they only want to pay for functionality they're using, and do so as granularly as possible. Microsoft has been working to identify workloads where Azure makes sense for specific industries. For example, insurance companies could use Azure to update the actuarial tables that drive their policy calculations, Martin said.

(SD Times) Microsoft is poised to deliver its Windows Azure Web services platform this year and has begun conditioning its customers to understand the challenges and benefits of cloud computing. Azure's platform technology will evolve more rapidly than Microsoft's traditional operating system release schedule, Martin said. It will be more like a Web construct than a series of Windows milestones, he explained. The Azure operating system is a modified version of Windows Server 2008.

(ComputerWorld) Future versions of Windows Server will enable companies to efficiently manage and provide virtualized applications through the Web just like Microsoft Corp.'s upcoming platform as a service. Azure is expected to be released later this year. Detailed pricing hasn't been released. Conventional hosting entails companies buying or leasing a server from a data center operator and running a set number of applications off it. That can be complicated to manage, entail a lot of upfront cost, and can be difficult to scale quickly on demand.

(InformationWeek) Cloud computing is evolving quickly, and Windows clouds are finally taking shape. Windows in the cloud has been slow to develop, but we now know when Microsoft plans to deliver, and you can count the months on two hands. Now the discussion can begin to shift from when Windows clouds will happen to who wants them and why.

(ZDNet) It had been four months since Microsoft took the official wraps off its cloud-computing initiative. Yet still relatively little was known about the Azure platform and plans. It has been said by Ray Ozzie’s teammates time and time again, without Ozzie’s oversight and direct intervention, Red Dog (or what is now branded Windows Azure) and the broader Azure platform wouldn’t have come together as quickly or comprehensively as they did.

(Seattle Times) Another major piece of Microsoft's online services puzzle is Windows Azure. Steven Martin, senior director of Developer Platform Product Management for Microsoft, said much of the discussion has centered on how application hosting can benefit startup companies. A young Web company can get its application up and running in a hosted data center fast and without the risk of buying and maintaining its own servers. But Martin also sees an opportunity with larger, established companies that currently host their own critical business applications in-house – again because of the choice and flexibility the platform offers, he said.

(eWeek) Azure is Microsoft's entry into the cloud computing world, pitting it against the likes of Amazon.com and Google. Like Amazon.com, Microsoft has created a software system that runs on Microsoft's own distributed data centers. Microsoft has made available its Windows Azure SDK, which currently is in Community Technology Preview form, for application development. Azure is quite large, and during the next year we're going to see several entire books written about Azure.

(eWeek) Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, in an interview with eWEEK at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, delved into a series of subjects, most prominently open source and interoperability, software modeling, and the Windows Azure cloud operating system.

(InformationWeek) How should IT departments prepare for Microsoft's forthcoming Azure cloud computing services? That was what we wanted to know when InformationWeek sat down with Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie at the company's Professional Developers Conference this week in Los Angeles.

(CNET News.com) Microsoft's Hailstorm prompted an avalanche of criticism when it was proposed seven years ago, but developers seem to have few qualms with Windows Azure, which embraces many of the same notions. With Windows Azure, Microsoft not only controls the operating system but also the data centers where the applications run and the servers where the information is stored.

(Network World) Claiming to set the stage for the next 50 years of computing, Microsoft this week unveiled a cloud operating system and a complementary slate of developer resources that will become the core of its services platform and provide an online delivery option for all its current software.

(Network World) This week, Microsoft took the wraps off the cloud operating system that CEO Steve Ballmer hinted at earlier this month and that has been under development for two years under Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. Named Azure, it is the foundation of what will become the hosting platform run by Microsoft.

(ITBusiness.ca) Microsoft Corp. used this year's Professional Developer's Conference to announce Windows Azure, a new services-based operating environment for what Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect is calling “Windows in the cloud.”