Today is the day for Azure to go live.
What this means (according to communicating to Community Technology Preview participants) is that Microsoft should start issuing instructions this week on how to move from CTP to a commercial account.
It’s also not clear yet, how the relationship will work yet (and there are some broken links from the Azure portal) between billing, portal account and login ID, but I imagine there needs to be Live IDs for the billing accounts and then permitted administrator Live IDs for the portal.
The Windows Azure Platform continues to be free until Feb 1 2010, during the first billing on-ramp phase.
If you are interested in giving Windows Azure a spin while it’s still free in January then you may want to try this Azure deployment guide with included sample application, successfully used by hundreds of people.
More posts soon on some of the insights of building a Silverlight application and hosting it on Windows Azure…
Colinizer 
Hi colonizer,
I’m very interested in adressing the performance and security questions which we are faced with when it comes to getting smaller business decision makers to step into cloud services like Azure. With some years under the belt (>10 in hosting on open source and Microsoft) We are very know for our wordpress MU capabilities. Now we are starting up a new Dutch BV (similar to US LLC) where we will deliver acces to the cloud and coop with foreign partners like servepath LLC in the US. however they had to admitt they were not able to present a POP in Netherlands. And as Microsoft partner myself I’ve placed this question with MS support. The answer was Amsterdam is in prep but we can start using Azure resources from Dublin. Are there any manuals? , ergo documentation to setup testbed and start tests on response times , query performance etc…etc…
I’ve looked around in MSDN and MS partner site but tmho there is so much not spoken about….Where did you start?
I will try and install you app, and see if I can get it up and running coming week….
Thank you in advance,
Ron
This is the main reqson I love colinizer.com. Unbelievable post.