Microsoft launched the Azure cloud based platform at the PDC today.  Microsoft has launched many file storage services that were their cloud offerings to date in Mesh, Foldershare, Groove and more.  Azure is what appears to be a real cloud platform to compete with Amazon and Google rather than just storage hosting.

Build new applications in the cloud – or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications. You choose what’s right for you.

It appears so far that it is pretty Microsoft centric for tool support.  Of course the software and servers will be Windows.  This week and last, Microsoft platforms have made their way into the cloud platforms at Amazon and now Microsoft.  Google also recently announced the support of Java.  Another set of aquisitions at Rackspace in the buying of Slicehost and JungleDisk also seem to show the space heating up and the companies all believing in the cloud platform emergence and evolution that seems to be happening.

ZDNet reports that Microsoft officially dropped a beta of Live Mesh to a familiar 10,000 developers, of which many slots were taken by Microsoft employees themselves who are programmers annoyingly referred to as ’softies’.

The service or system built on another term called Horizon is their competitor to Amazon’s AWS platform and Google App Engine as well as many other emerging companies and platforms offering scalable cloud based services.

From the looks of the schematics and diagrams it appears closer to a Google App Engine hosted service rather than a componentized Amazon model.

Techcrunch reported that Google, the original research and development behind BigTable, MapReduce and other great cloud technology base architectures, is probably going to launch their own BigTable database in the cloud for developers like Amazon’s SimpleDB.

Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch. There are also rumors that press is being pre-briefed on the product, although we haven’t been contacted by Google.

BigTable is a highly scalable database system used internally by Google to support over 60 of its products and projects. A source says Google has plans to announce next week that it will make BigTable available to outside developers as a service. Amazon provides a similar service through SimpleDB, a cloud database solution announced in December.

Techcrunch seems to think this will be released next week, with other services to follow up. This is the future, Amazon is well ahead but the power of Google is in the wings waiting. Also, Microsoft might show up with CloudDB or the next version of sql server having this capability. Service and pricing will determine the winner as cloud computing and storage is fairly new and very simple (usually the db is almost an active record like system where is it just flat tables and not alot of relational data).

The future of your software initiatives just might not need an entire infrastructure and IT management team…

The services and cloud web are changing software rapidly.