Lazycoder

Where do you want to go today? The cloud – Azure

Microsoft announced its cloud computing service, Azure, today at PDC 2008. At first glance, it looks like the Google Applications Engine using .NET languages. It follows the same kind of pricing model as GAE did when it launched. During the CTP, you get so much usage for free and once you hit a cap, you pay for the resources your application uses. Once the full service is launched, you pay for the resources your application consumes. Hopefully there will still be a certain amount of free usage.

This is another me-too cloud service, but in my opinion you can’t have too many options in the marketplace. Hopefully, the three services will be competitive in terms of price and features. Amazon EC2 is basically just an instance of Windows or Linux, so you can run whatever you want on your instance. GAE limits you to Python and maybe Java in the future. Azure is limited to .NET languages right now, but I bet that IronRuby and IronPython will be making their way to the platform.