Today at the Microsoft Partner Network conference in New Orleans, Microsoft announced the pricing and availability of Windows Azure. But what is Windows Azure? Read on to find out.

What is Windows Azure?

Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing offering. It refers to applications that run remotely over the internet, on servers hosted by Microsoft itself, rather than on a company's local machines. Windows Azure technology could also be used on locally-hosted machines, which is known as on-premise'.

Using cloud computing is a much more efficient way of distributing applications and for gaining access to greater computing power.

I still don't get it. Why would you want to do put your applications in the cloud? Give me some examples.

Think of it as utility computing giving you access to on-demand' computing that you can turn on or off at will. Imagine a website selling concert tickets. This will come under extremely heavy demand the moment a popular act's tickets go on sale.

With utility computing it could plan in advance for those huge peaks, by renting the amount of computing power and storage it requires for that short amount of time.

Another example would be a TV show that advertised an activity on its website in order to make the programme more interactive. That web site would receive a huge amount of traffic straight after the broadcast, but very little in the days after.