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Red Dog: Microsoft's Developer Cloud Platform

Job listings suggest Microsoft is preparing a cloud-based utility computing service for developers, code named Red Dog.

Now that Google has entered the utility computing fray with Google App Engine, many cloud computing enthusiasts are wondering whether Microsoft will offer a similar developer-focused platform. The folks at Live Side have uncovered job postings indicating Microsoft is preparing a competing service called Red Dog. An excerpt:

We did a little digging, and although nothing specific has been announced yet (and we don't have a timetable), a new set of services, part of Ray Ozzie's four layer platform of services, is indeed being readied. One of these, the Microsoft Utility Computing Platform, code named Red Dog, sounds very much like a platform for building a Google App Engine type service (except maybe quite a bit better). In a job posting for an SDET, the Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team has provided us with some of the juicy tidbits we found.

The job listings describe a service featuring an "efficient, virtualized" environment with a "fully automated service management system" that can "scale to millions of machines." Read LiveSide for the full story.