Microsoft's cloud computing environment has been released including the Azure operating system, .NET Services, and SQL Azure.

Cloud computing is development, computation and storage that is done within the internet 'cloud' on servers hosted by a third party.  Amazon was one of the first companies to release a commercial grade cloud computing environment with their S3 and EC2 platforms. 

Cloud computing promises to provide an endless supply of storage and processing power for increasingly complex internet based applications.  Microsoft recognizes that software development is rapidly moving towards the cloud and has been developing their Azure platform to compete with the Amazon services for a couple of years.

Because of the long beta period, the community and code gallery is well developed and getting started with Azure as a Microsoft developer is relatively easy.

Visit the Azure developer center:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/azure/default.aspx

Download the tools and SDK:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/azure/default.aspx