On Tuesday Microsoft announced that Windows Azure would support the LAMP stack, well perhaps “the -AMP stack” is a better term. With Linux out of the picture, Microsoft is courting developers building on top of Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python including the users of the wildly popular WordPress blogging software.
The headliner for this new support is the company that created widely popular sites such as like “I can has cheez burger”. While continuing to use WordPress as their application framework and PHP/MySQL for their backend, they are now hosting their new site, Oddly Specific, on Windows Azure. They choose Windows Azure because they have “spiky” traffic that can vary wildly from day to day. Rather than purchasing hardware they may not need or only need for brief intervals, they instead use Windows Azure to dynamically alter their capacity
While a few companies are going live today, for most developers the production Azure servers will not be available until the first of January. Microsoft will be testing their provisioning and billing system during this month, so during that month Azure hosting is free.