Yesterday at PDC 2008, Microsoft opened the first day of the Professional Developer Conference giving center stage to their forthcoming “Cloud OS” now known as Windows Azure.

Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. 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 internet or cloud applications. In the early stages of CTP, .NET managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Windows Azure let’s developers provide their own unique customer offerings by offering the foundational components of compute, storage and building block servcies to author and compose applications in the cloud.  “As you’ll see today, we’re betting on Azure ourselves, and as the system scales out, we’ll be bringing more and more of our own key apps and key services onto Windows Azure because it will be our highest scale, highest availability, most economical, and most environmentally sensitive way of hosting services in the cloud.” said Ray Ozzie during the day one keynote at PDC. “A few of those key services, when taken together with Windows Azure itself, constitute a much larger Azure Services Platform. These higher level developer services, which you can mix and match ala carte, provide functions that as Windows developers you’ll find quite valuable and familiar and useful.”

With the launch of Azure, Microsoft will find itself in competition with other providers of Internet storage and computing services including Amazon, Salesforce.com, and Rackspace.

Ozzie said he was tipping his cap to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for innovating the hosted computing model. Amazon "established a base-level design pattern, architecture models, and business models that we’ll all learn from," he said.

Microsoft is making Windows Azure in preview form to developers, with a limited subset of the features that it plans to have in the product before its final release.

There weren’t many details on how Microsoft will charge for Azure, saying it will be free during the preview period. Final pricing, Ozzie said, "will be competitive with the marketplace."

PDC 2008 Replay: Ray Ozzie Explains The Key Benefits of Windows Azure(Time: 1:19)

PDC 2008 Replay: Watch The Day 1 Keynote On Demand Now (Time: 1 hour 38 minutes)

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