Yesterday I went to the Mid-Atlantic Cloud Computing user group in Reston, VA. It’s a newly formed group that plans to meet once a month.  The topic of the evening was Windows Azure, in which Scott Zimmerman from Microsoft gave a great overview of their online suite of products with a focus on the Compute and Storage capabilities of Windows Azure.  I wont go into the topic right now as the presentation is available, but below are a few interesting notes:

• $500 million dollars invested for each data center
• Half of all Exchange/SharePoint/Dynamic CRM revenue is expected to come from online service in the next 5 years
• Everything is replicated at least 3 times
• Currently runs .NET and C++.  Java/Ruby other languages coming soon
• Visual Studio works with all of the services but is not required, everything is exposed through REST and SOAP
• BizTalk Server 2009 can be used to help manage connections to the cloud
• Declarative Fabric controller handles the deployment and configuration automatically
• Community Tech Preview is currently free.  Service will be live by the end of 2009 with pricing plans Other Cloud Computing links of interest:

http://www.cloudcamp.com/ http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/ http://videos.visitmix.com/mix09 has videos on all of the sessions including some on the Microsoft Azure platform.