Microsoft Announces Windows Azure and Azure Services Platform

[From MSDN Blogs]

Today at PDC, Ray Ozzie announced our all up cloud services platform. It was a great day for a whole bunch of us who have worked on the database part of the platform for the past 2 years. We announced our cloud compute, storage and management service called Windows Azure. These are the essential services and we can think of this as the Cloud OS. Next we have the Azure Service Platform. This includes .Net Services, SQL Services and Live Services. Microsoft SQL Services is now the all up brand for the scale out database service in the cloud (SQL Data Services) and will include services like Data Sync, Reporting Services, Analytics Services, Integration Services and Reference Data Services over time. As part of this announcement, we now have an all new landing page for SQL Services here.

The article continues at

http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/archive/2008/10/27/9018836.aspx