And on through the Fog of Microsoft’s “Cloud OS” Azure

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect and creator of Lotus Notes, announced Windows Azure today during the Windows PDC (Professional Developers Conference) event in Los Angeles (here). Azure coincidentally sounds an awful lot like du Jour, as in “technology hype du Jour”

Windows Azure, previously code name “Red Dog” is a hosted suite of services, including a highly scalable virtualization fabric (a what?), scalable storage, and an automated service management system. It is pretty close to the Amazon web services platform EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), except for the whole “Only Microsoft” thing. Hoff was on the ball and posted his thoughts earlier today (here)

Look, when I’m forced into vendor lock-in in order to host my applications and I am confined to one vendor’s datacenters without portability, that’s not ” the cloud” and it’s not an “open architecture,” it’s marketing-speak for “we’re now your ASP/XaaS service provider of choice.”

You can “experience” Azure here (here) also check out Manuvir Das, Director in the Windows Azure team explain the Windows “Cloud OS” (here) or Steve Marx presentation, Azure for Developers (here)

You can read my previous thoughts on cloud-computing (here) and (here)