Windows Azure - available. Google Apps Store - soon.
February 02, 2010 | Author: Michael Stromann
Today Microsoft has officially opened its cloud platform Windows Azure. It's a cloud for deploying SaaS services and hosting enterprise applications, that provides Microsoft-focused infrastructure and development tools. However, Azure also supports PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Python, Java, Eclipse and Zend. The main Azure advantage over Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud is the high level of automation, allowing developers to focuse on their applications, rather than on the infrastructure. In addition, this platform enables to integrate hosted apps with the local IT infrastructure with the help of SOAP, REST and XML (thus supporting Microsoft's S+S strategy). The cost of using Windows Azure - is lower than the cost of Windows-infrastructure, built on Amazon.
Also today Wall Street Journal reported that Google will open an application marketplace for Google Apps in March. As you know, something like this already exists (Google Solutions Marketplace), but its not very suitable and supposes separate payments for third-party providers. The new Google App Store will allow to easily add apps to your account and pay to Google for them (and Google will pay to the developers. It is rumored, that developers will get about 70%). In addition recently Google Apps Standard Edition users were allowed to automate some tasks in their online office suite using the Google Apps Script.
See also: Top 10 Public Cloud Platforms