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The company claims Azure will allow anyone from hobbyists to enterprises to write and host applications on the software giant's data centres.

"We've been working for some years now on a platform for computing in the cloud," said chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, announcing Windows Azure. "We're setting the stage for the next 50 years of systems."

"It's a service running on a vast number of machines in Microsoft's own data centres, first in the US and then worldwide," Ozzie added. "It will be our highest scale, highest availability, most economical and most environmentally friendly platform."

Ozzie was quick to dismiss criticism that Microsoft's cloud-computing vision was simply a rehash of old virtualisation and network-computing concepts. "Is this cloud thing any different to the things we've known in the past?" he asked. "The answer is absolutely, resoundingly yes," he claimed, explaining that corporate computer systems have shifted from serving merely their own employees to customers from across the globe on the web.

Microsoft claims Azure will make it easier and cheaper for companies to write applications that can rapidly scale to meet demand. Developers will be able to code applications using existing .net languages, and test them on their local PC before a full rollout. "We have built a platform that allows you to develop your

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killer applications," said Amitabh Srivastava, Microsoft's corporate vice president. "You can write, test and debug code on a desktop machine. There's no need to deploy to the cloud for initial testing."

The company also provided a demonstration of a new mobile-phone social-networking application being hosted on Azure, that could crank up the amount of computing cores available to its software simply by changing a line of XML code through a web interface.

Data centre building

Ozzie said Microsoft has been rapidly expanding its data centre capacity to cope with the new generation of cloud services - not only those being hosted for the company's customers but its own range of online services and applications.

In the past year the company has opened up two new data centres in the US, and plans to open further centres in Chicago and Dublin in the coming months. Yesterday the company revealed that it was bringing 10,000 new servers online every month, with new data centres costing $500,000 each.

The company claims such scale will help it achieve the "24/7 reliability" that web services demand. "Our data storage system partitions and replicates data across hundreds of machines, possibly thousands of machines," Srivastava said.

Azure rollout

Microsoft is inviting developers here at the Professional Developers Conference to be among the first to test out and develop applications for the Azure platform. Ozzie said the company would be "deliberately conservative" with the rollout of Azure, and would allow early testers to host applications for free, to compensate for the potential disruption and incompatibilities that might arise as the service nears a full commercial rollout.

When Azure is released commercially, the charges will be scaled depending on the amount of computing power an application requires and the service level Microsoft provides, Ozzie revealed.