Today during the PDC 2008 keynote Ray Ozzie announced Microsoft “new operating system for the cloud” called Windows Azure. Unlike a traditional Microsoft operating system Windows Azure is a services platform that is hosted by Microsoft in Microsoft data centers. Designed to help developers quickly design with Visual Studio integration and deploy web-based services efficiently by reducing up front technology purchases. In short, Windows Azure is a new way to develop and deploy web apps in an extremely scalable environment managed by Microsoft.

Once a developer is ready to deploy they can select how many nodes they want to use in the Microsoft cloud of computing power.  As your web service becomes more popular, the developer can log in to the management web site and increase the node count with just a few clicks.

To help developers Microsoft will also be providing a number of services such as SQL services to provide database functionality that almost every web apps needs.

When Windows Azure is released pricing will be based on how much storage, bandwidth and compute time an application uses.

Visit the Windows Azure Community Technology Preview

Read the Microsoft Press Release