The “cloud” is a hot topic these days for just about anyone involved with the web. From big 
corporations to the indie developer looking to take advantage of the new technologies, the cloud, both private and public, is getting ever increasing buzz as we move everything we do to the web.
Microsoft’s push into this new world is called Windows Azure, and as with most platforms from the company, they are making a big push by trying to gain developer attention. Through tight integration into to the company’s development tools like Visual Studio and an increasing base of supported development languages; .NET, PHP, and Java, Microsoft hopes to make their cloud initiative attractive to more than just the typical Windows developer.
In keeping with that, they have started a free trial for Windows Azure that will run until September 30, 2011. As a part of the trial developers get the following:
- 750 hours of Extra Small Compute Instance and 25 hours of Small Compute Instance
- 20GB of storage with 50k Storage transactions
- 20GB in / 20GB out of data transactions
- 1GB Web Edition SQL Azure database (90 days only)
- 128MB AppFabric caching
[cross-posted at Winextra]
