http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/cloud/2010/06/11/how-microsofts-azure-and-cloud-services-are-shaping-up-40089188/

It’s remarkable how quickly the company is orienting itself towards this. Inside the company, certainly if you’re not talking about the cloud, you’re very much behind the times.

Once Azure was released in a ready-to-use form, I read some information about it, but very little of it was aimed at someone like me who did not know the fundamentals. And unfortunately, Microsoft has formed a really bad habit of putting useful information into online videos… as if anyone who works for a living has time to sit through three or four hour-long videos without even being sure if the video really contains the information that they need. All the same, I was able to wade through enough of the available information to find out what Windows Azure is and the basic concepts behind developing for it.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=2671

The Azure platform looks like an interesting choice if you’re a .NET developer, although I don’t know how the pricing stacks up compared to other services. I think that Azure would definitely be a good choice for things like batch processing (say, running reports, unit tests, integration tests, etc.) where it can be put under a heavy load and scaled down, and the SLA concerns are not a major issue.

http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1310316

“The cloud fuels Microsoft, and Microsoft fuels the cloud,”

http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2010/03/microsoft-woos-eu-governments-onto-the-cloud/

Given that every European government will be looking for cost savings in the next few years, it’s a good time to be talking about doing away with in-house servers and IT staff and moving to the cloud

Governments and businesses alike are looking at cloud services as a way to consolidate IT infrastructure, scale their IT systems for the future, and enable innovative services and activities that were not possible before.

To help organisations realise the benefits of cloud services, technology vendors are investing in the hard work of identifying and solving the challenges presented by operating in mixed IT environments and are collaborating to ensure that their products work well together.

In fact, although the industry is still in the early stages of collaborating on cloud interoperability issues, there has already been considerable progress. But what does “cloud interoperability” mean, and how is it benefiting people today?

http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/Collaborating-on-cloud-interoperability/4483/Default.aspx

With all the excitement around the cloud, Shank says it’s easy to lose sight of the payoff. “To be clear, cloud computing has enormous potential to stimulate economic growth and enable governments to reduce costs and expand services to citizens.”

Following a no-cost test period, Microsoft on Feb. 1 will begin charging customers for its pay-per-use Windows Azure cloud services.

Microsoft unveiled Azure at its PDC conference in Oct. 2008, and since then it has been preparing the on-demand computing service for commercial availability. For the past month, Microsoft let customers use Azure for free in order to get experience with the service and a sense of how usage will translate into cost. On Feb. 1, the meter starts running.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/saas/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222600247

Microsoft wants to makes it easier for customers to deploy and manage applications that span both corporate data centers and Azure in so-called hybrid clouds. A major area of emphasis going forward will be on “server-service cohesion,”

iStore launched on Thursday Digital Oilfield Online, a cloud-based hosting service for its PetroTrek software suite. The company unveiled its online cloud computing capability at the Microsoft Global Energy Forum, where it announced the immediate availability of cloud-hosted PetroTrek solutions in addition to its existing on-premises offerings.

iStore, which helps oil and gas companies access, organize and visualize exploration and production (E&P) data, has adopted the Microsoft Windows Azure Services platform for delivering Digital Oilfield solutions in the cloud.

http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8216:istore-brings-cloud-computing-to-the-digital-oilfield&catid=230:cloud-computing&Itemid=2701186

The new service supports the Public Petroleum Data Model (PPDM), an open standard widely accepted by the industry for business-oriented data storage. This gives companies a roadmap for moving capital-intensive on-premises data management to the cloud.

Many technology experts believe that 2010 will usher in a new era in computing. In the beginning of PC computing, all applications were run from (and data was stored on) each individual system’s local hard drive. As time went on, companies recognized the benefits of centralized management and control and moved to a model where data is stored on, and many apps are run from, servers on the local network. The next step will move apps and data storage even farther away from the end user, into the “cloud,” with everything residing on remote servers accessed via the Internet. This will allow users to access those programs and data anywhere, from any Internet-connected machine, including low-powered (and low-cost) netbooks.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1282

Cloud platforms are available from various vendors, including Amazon, IBM, and Google. But Deb Shinder thinks Microsoft Azure might be the best choice.

Developers urged testers currently subscribed to the Azure Community Technology Preview to upgrade their accounts to paid subscriptions by February 1. Users who do not upgrade will be unable to create new databases, but will retain access to existing databases between February 1 and March 1. Clients who do not upgrade by March 1 will have their accounts deleted.

http://www.edlconsulting.com/newsdetail.php?id=596&headline=Microsoft_Azure_cloud_computing_platform_due_February_1

The Microsoft Azure enterprise cloud computing platform will have its full commercial release on February 1, the company revealed in a blog post on Monday.

Windows 7 has put the swagger back into Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s stride. But with Windows Azure, the cloud computing platform that will debut as a paid service on Feb. 1, Microsoft faces a new type of challenge: showing the industry that its deep software expertise can translate into success in the Wild West frontier of cloud computing.

http://www.crn.com/software/222200160;jsessionid=RXF1Z1MFSJYOJQE1GHPSKH4ATMY32JVN

Microsoft, aware that virtualization is the first step many companies are taking into cloud computing, has focused on virtual machine support in Azure so that businesses can leverage existing on premise applications in the cloud.