Halo 4 is almost here. The series of first-person shooter games for Xbox has been wildly successful, with millions of players worldwide, many of them playing concurrently over the Xbox Live network. However, a game at that scale can be difficult and costly to manage, and if it goes down, it means lost revenue for Microsoft (which owns the title) and frustrations for players.

With Halo 4, which will launch Nov. 6, the multiplayer game will now be backed by Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform. It's said to be the first game of Halo's scale to be supported by Azure, which will enable the expected millions of concurrent users to vaporize each other as much as they want without a hiccup.

"Part of what we were looking to Azure for was how to reduce cost," says Jerry Hook, executive producer of the Halo series. "The game is very peak oriented, where you'll have a big rush of consumers coming right at the beginning. That really stresses your services, and you normally have to build out for it, which is extremely expensive. So the elasticity that Azure brings allows us to scale back down."

Using Windows Azure has other advantages, too, mainly in the development process. Hook says the cloud service gave his programmers the tools they needed to develop and test in parallel.

"We don't have that large of a service organization," he says, "so I had to make sure that each one of my developers and testers could basically create their own labs. We pretty much took advantage of the entire Azure technical stack."

Halo's development studio is owned by Microsoft, so it obviously had a big home field advantage here, but Microsoft is clearly doing its best to showcase Windows Azure as an alternative to other cloud services such as Amazon's EC2.

For gamers, they shouldn't notice a thing, which is the point. In fact, one of the advangages of switching to a cloud-backed system is that the Halo network won't go down when it needs upgrades. Just keep on fragging, guys.