I arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday, with a warm and beatiful day welcoming me in California. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been to L.A., being the first US city I visited it represents the typical America. But enough about this, let’s get to the PDC stuff.

We have just had the keynote with Ray Ozzie announcing the Windows Azure, with interventions by Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and David Thompson.

Windows Azure Platform announcement during keynote

Azure Platform

Azure is the name for Microsoft’s Software + Services platform. With this announcement today we are talking about a platform that includes the following:

Windows Azure: operating system in the cloud providing services for hosting, management, scalable storage with support for simple blobs, tables, and queues, as well as a management infrastructure for provisioning and geo-distribution of cloud-based services, and a development platform for the Azure Services layer. Today already Live Mesh and Live Meeting are already using Windows Azure.

Azure Services Platform, developer services with support for familiar tools, languages, frameworks, such as ASP.NET, C#, LINQ, WCF, WF:

• SQL Services for relational data storage, querying and reporting services
• .NET Services for cloud-based access control, federated directory, service-connectivity, workflow, and messaging services
• Live Services for application extension of the Windows Live platform (Windows Live ID, Live Mesh, Virtual Earth, etc)
• SharePoint Services which provide extensibility for SharePoint Server (future)
• Dynamics CRM Services which provide extensibility for Dynamics CRM (future)

On top of that there is the finished services layer, with Windows Live, Office Live, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. All of these hosted in the cloud and commercially available today. We saw a few demos of these services with CRM and SharePoint online.

Now ready for my first session “A Lap Around Cloud Services Part 1”, and tomorrow we’ll have yet more announcements!

Watch tomorrow’s keynote that will be streamed live at www.microsoftpdc.com.

Update: you can download the Windows Azure SDK from www.azure.com, play with it and test locally on your own machine. Access to the online hosted version is currently limited to PDC attendees but will probably be extended later this year.