A cloud computing platform from Microsoft that comprises the Azure Services Platform and the Windows Azure "cloud services" operating system. It is a comprehensive environment for developing applications that are hosted in Microsoft datacenters or in a customer's own datacenter. Expected for release in 2009, Azure is a major foray into cloud computing by Microsoft.

Azure Services Platform
The Azure cloud platform enables developers to write cloud-based applications that work on desktops as well as all the modern mobile devices that have become mainstream. Microsoft programming languages such as Visual Studio support Azure, and the platform has been declared open to encourage non-Microsoft language support.

Windows Azure
Windows Azure is a version of Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V that is specialized to provide a layer, or interface, to any number of Windows servers in the datacenter. It includes support for managing clusters of computers that can provide computing resources and storage on demand. See SaaS and cloud computing.