Microsoft plans to transition its Windows Azure cloud computing platform from preview to full production capacity on January 1 next year, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie announced at the annual PDC conference on Tuesday. The service, currently operating as a free Community Technology Preview (CTP), will remain no-cost throughout January; from February 1 it will start accumulating charges. The cost schedule was previously announced in July.

Since its initial announcement at PDC 2008, the Azure CTP has been available to developers to allow them to test and explore the capabilities of the platform. "Tens of thousands of developers have participated in the CTP and you've made a tremendous impact on the product," Ozzie said. The free month will allow this testing to continue; it will also, for the first time, give developers the chance to preview their usage and learn how much use of the platform will cost once billing starts.

The CTP has thus far included three components: the Windows Azure platform itself, a scalable, manageable Windows environment allowing both .NET and native development, including support for CGI, PHP, and other Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies; SQL Azure, a replicated, fault-tolerate, high-performance version of SQL Server; and AppFabric (formerly known as .NET Services), a collection of Web services providing reliable asynchronous communications, message queuing, and other glue infrastructure useful for interoperating with the cloud.

Further to these, Microsoft announced a new Azure service now included in the CTP. Codenamed "Dallas," the new service gives developers the ability to discover, purchase, and manage data subscriptions within Azure. The technology was showcased by PDC by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. Kundra demonstrated a career-finding application based on Department of Labor teaching data stored and catalogued by Dallas that allowed, for example, teachers to find which areas of the country needed more teachers. The application was able to drill down within the dataset, for example, to find out exactly what kind of special education teachers were required in a particular area. Behind the scenes, Dallas itself is built atop Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

Kundra claimed that enabling access to public data in this way was a critical step in achieving the efficiency, openness, and transparency required of Open Government. By making data available openly and publicly with Dallas, developers will gain new power to "remix" and experiment.

During the CTP period a number of data providers are available through Dallas, including NASA's Pathfinder images of Mars. NASA and Microsoft together launched a competition, the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge, to see how students and developers can make best use of the huge amount of data that the Pathfinder mission produced.

Ozzie also described improvements to the Microsoft Pinpoint service. Pinpoint can now be used by developers and IT managers to find Azure services (both software and data), and its service catalogue is now integrated into the Azure front-end.

Ozzie wrapped up by underlining Microsoft's investment and belief in cloud computing, and the potential that the technology offers customers. Redmond is betting that cloud computing will herald a new wave of exciting development opportunities and a bright future of interconnected cloud applications—and that Azure will be fundamental to this brave new world.