Microsoft is set to deliver Windows Azure to the public by the end of this year, with an imminent announcement at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles on November 17, 2009. 

When Steve Ballmer mentioned this February that Windows Azure “will reach fruition with the PDC this year” I didn’t really believed it, considering where the product was and how much we knew about the progress Microsoft was making on delivering Windows Azure and related services. Even TechEd this year was surprisingly quiet about Windows Azure, but this is just the silence before the storm. Microsoft is revving up the software development and marketing machine so at this year’s PDC cloud computing and Windows Azure will take again center stage.

Starting this summer with the 2009 Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), New Orleans, July 13-16, we will see more and more announcements about Windows Azure. So what to expect in the next months? Continue reading…

Amazon web services blog has information about the latest and most powerful feature of S3 - Requester Pays which works at the level of an S3 bucket. If the bucket’s owner flags it as Requester Pays, then all data transfer and request costs are paid by the party accessing the data.

Like any other Amazon Service, there’s cost associated with it. By marking a bucket as Requester Pays, data owners can provide access to large data sets without incurring charges for data transfer or requests. For example, they could make available a 1 GB dataset at a cost of just 15 cents per month. Requesters use signed and specially flagged requests to identify themselves to AWS, paying for S3 GET requests and data transfer at the usual rates — 17 cents per GB for data transfer and 1 cent for every 10,000 GET requests. Here’s the documentation explaining in details how the feature should and can be used. 

Amazon is also pushing Amazon DevPay service to developers, they have an integration of the Requester Pay model with DevPay described here.

Amazon’s DevPay service graduated from beta to general availability, which means that it is now easier for companies in the United States to build a business based on Amazon Web Services.

DevPay allows you to sell your own applications based on Amazon’s storage (S3) and computing (EC2) services. You set the price that customers will pay and the service then takes care of the billing and account management tasks, leaving you free to concentrate on your application.

Unfortunately you still need to have a U.S. bank account to register for a DevPay account. From the FAQ:

Sellers of Amazon DevPay applications must be able to do business in the United States. Funds earned through the sale of Amazon DevPay applications can only be withdrawn to U.S. bank accounts.

So it looks like those of us outside the U.S. will have to remain patient.

Who’s using DevPay? Continue reading…