According to a Tuesday announcement made by the Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, at the annual PDC conference, Microsoft will launch its new Windows Azure service on January 1, 2010, thereby marking its foray into the commercial cloud computing arena.

At present, the Microsoft Azure platform is functional as a free Community Technology Preview (CTP), including three components, namely - the Windows Azure platform itself; SQL Azure; and AppFabric, earlier called .NET Services.

The no-cost service will continue throughout January, and it will be from February 1 onwards that the software company will begin accumulating charges for the service, as per the cost schedule announced in July.

The new service, which provides developers with the ability to discover, purchase, and manage data subscriptions within Azure, will run users’ applications on its servers, along with providing them sufficient capacity via its massive datacenters. As such, the service will help websites to cater to growing demands that might otherwise paralyze them.

Noting the benefits of the Azure platform, Ozzie said: “For consumers, the best result of cloud computing is that they don't notice it;” and added that for retailers and manufacturers dealing with customers on the web, Azure does “the hard work of figuring out how to build really high-scale systems that deal with all the consumers, and it lets businesses focus on what they are good at.”