PDC 2008 is on the rail and of all the developer-garbage Microsoft has talked about yet, Windows Azure seems to be the only one under the spotlight.

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.

According to the Microsoft, Windows Azure may be used to:

• Add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications.
• Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources.
• Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively.
• Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources.
• Reduce the effort and costs of IT management.

Windows Azure provides developers with a scalable platform and a rich development environment that allows them to focus on the business logic of your application without worrying about operational constraints or lock-in.

This means that other cloud computing platforms like Google and Amazon are about to meet their arch-nemesis.

Another interesting observation is the change of the name from Windows Strata to Windows Azure. No one yet knows why Microsoft planned to change the name of the cloud computing platform at the very last moment but our previous observation clearly indicates that the service was originally known as Windows Strata and not Azure.

Tomorrow on PDC 2008, the focus will be put to Windows 7 and consumer technologies so don't forget to check that out. As for now, take a deeper look into Azure.

http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazure.mspx