Windows Azure Pay-Per-Use to Start this February 2010

As of this writing, we only have exactly 15 days to play around with Windows Azure. Beginning February this year, Windows Azure will finally go commercial. You can read the entire article here for the pricing details.

Windows Azure is Microsoft's implementation of cloud computing. One of its notable features is its storage services which are of prime importance with regards to the cloud computing business. If you have time, you can download the Windows Azure SDK and tinker around with it which is one of its great advantage - running a local development fabric on your computer to simulate what is going to happen in the cloud.

If you have Visual Studio 2008 and an OS of Windows Vista, Server 2008 or Windows 7, you can give it a try. It's worth it. It has tutorials on how to create cloud-based applications which practically is very similar to creating web-based applications. Also worth noting would be its interoperability with PHP. It has PHP-support thru FastCGI so you can deploy a site created out of PHP into the cloud.