I’m currently in New York visiting customers and attending Interop/Web 2.0. While these two conferences have different session tracks their expos are co-located and attendees of either can visit the whole lot. It was then in the Web 2.0 section earlier today where I met Keith Pijanowski, a Microsoft evangelist for Windows Azure.
Keith has been working with Azure the last year and half and telling customers how it can drive down costs and make their software development cycle more agile. I got Keith to take a quick break from booth duty and explain it to me. (I wanted to know what all those Dell servers were powering). 
Some of the topics Keith tackles
- How it works: You develop on premise (the cloud environment is emulated on the developer’s desktop) and then upload your code to the cloud where you have all the services, resources and compute power needed to run your app. You then manage all your code and storage areas via a portal.
- Yesterday’s official commercial launch– tech preview no more.
- Azure is ready to use but Microsoft wont charge for another 2 mos. The last free month the customer will get a bill of what it would cost if they had had to pay.
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What’s coming to Azure in the future, some examples:
- Right now you have SQL Azure database in the cloud but they will build out the SQL Azure brand so that it has many of the same capabilities that customers are used to on premise.
- When .net 4.0 becomes available they will have a work flow service
- Will have synchronization services (SQL Azure sync) so customers can have a database in the cloud and one on premise and sync them.
Pau for now…