I'm  going to keep a running blog post that I'll update all during the day.

Ray Ozzie's big announcement is of the CTP of Windows Azure.  This is a cloud services platform offered by MS.  It consists of:

• Live Services
• .NET Services
• SQL Services
• Sharepoint Services
• Mycrosoft Dynamics CRM Services

Azure is an operating system for the cloud.  It appears to me that if you build .NET applications, you can just deploy them to Azure and run them there, and Azure will provide you a bunch of services (mentioned next).  Basically, it seems that you don't need to buy Windows Server to run your apps anymore, you just go and use Azure.  I kind of like that idea.

Azure will manage the global data center infrasturcture.  It will provide:

• Automated Service Management
• Seperating the application from the os, providing fabrics for application virtualization
• Fabric controller maintains the health of the service
• Idea is to manage services, not just the servers (roles and groups, channels and endpoints, interfaces, configuration settings).
• Services are modeled in xml
• and give high availability

The list of Azure technologies include: (and I didn't get all these because the slide changed too quickly):

• Service Mgmt (Geneva)
• Virtualized Compute (spin up virtual machines on demand)
• ...
  

The Azure SDK will contain:
- 4 cloud templates

A typical solution will consist of:

• A Cloud configuration project (which packages the app for insertion into Azure)
  
•   ASP.NET project (or other .net project I guess)

This is kind of like the Amazon EC2 config, where you describe you VM in xml and upload to Azure.  However, with this you don't need the OS.

The SDK provides a cloud on the desktop:

• All Azure API's can run local
• Allowing you to develop and test locally
• Then just deploy to the cloud
  

Deployment is through a publish option (like with ASP.NET publish), which packages the app, and takes you to the azure services developer portal.

• There you create a project
• And upload the package through the UI

Hopefully this can be made automatic in the future.

The showed some kind of silly app called Bluehoo.  It involves:

• Rest interface, silverlight client web app, cell phone client
• C# vs.net, win mobile client
• Dynamic compute node allocation

It is stated that Azure is open platform providing:

• Scalable hosting
• Rich environment
• MDA (Model driven architecture)
  
• SLM (service lifecyle management)
  
• Access from any tools (Eclipse was mentioned)

Muglia is not talkiing about:

Requirements for cloud services:

• Interoperability
• ID and Security
• Data Management & Compliance
• Services Management

.NET Services for Azure:

• Service Bus (service location and firewall traversal).  Lots of mention of this, but no word yet on how it works.
  
• Access control (federated identity)
• Workflow Services (scaled out implementation)

"Geneva" - federated hookup of existing heterogeneous and AD.

SQL Services.  SQL Server in the cloud include:

• Database
• Data Sync
• Reporting
• Data Mining
• ETL
• Reference data

This will be cool.  If they just have SQL Server in the cloud, and you don't have to install and manage, that would just be spectacular.

"System Center": Project "Atlanta"
Looks like a set of extensions of SMS to the cloud.  This looks pretty cool for OA&M of your cloud services.

It is stated that Azure can spin up virtual machines to handle load.  I really want to see this in action.

Nice, a mention of a new chart for Silverlight being handed out.  Matter of fact, a whole bunch of Silverlight based controls.  And in actuality it looks like Silverlight is being EXTENSIVELY used in Azure for UI.

Reporting services in Azure are available to application admins.  It looked like you can use this to report on your cloud application.

Oslo is for modeling.  Not much detail yet.

Azure components will migrate back into the OS windows server to build their own cloud internally.  This is a good strategy as I can see that as people become comfortable with the cloud concept, they will be able to migrate back into their own enterprise.

Federated services in cloud may kick the authentication back to your AD.  Simple configuration tools are available to set this up.  This is pretty cool for the identify federation.