Microsoft's head of marketing for Azure Prashant Ketkar, announced that Microsoft will be adding Remote Desktop Services and virtual machine support to Windows Azure. Without committing to a date Ketkar indicated that these new services were very high on the Azure team's list of priorities, expectations are that these could be available by the start of Q3 if not sooner.
Aside from pricing ($0.12 per hour) there's not much to say about this offering yet. It's nothing that you couldn't do before with Amazon EC2. But it's early days yet and between now and when the services launch it might offer something of real interest. Until then it does nothing more that encourage Amazon to sharpen its pencil and come up with some better pricing.
Update to my initial post
Microsoft have requested that that I make it clear that by extending Azure to support both RDP access and user developed virtual machines, they are not going to be providing any sort of DaaS offering themselves.
This does not mean that it isn't going to be possible to do this yourself; the core capability is certainly there, just that MS don't want to get into the DaaS business. Either way, it will be interesting to see how this turns out. I'd be very interested to see just how many IT organisations will now consider Azure for either their core desktop platform or as part of a business continuity solution.
