Some wondered after Google's App Engine announcement Monday evening when Microsoft would offer a competing cloud computing platform. The biggest tip off from the job advertisement that Red Dog is it, is that the CIS team wants the platform to "lead the marketplace as the best platform for rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of internet services and applications." Microsoft will supposedly roll out a first version of Red Dog to "external customers" (defined later as "ISV customers who are ... early adopters") this year.

As Kniskern points out, not much is known about Red Dog at this point, but indications seem to point to some sort of platform as a service offering from Microsoft dropping within the next year.

Note: No, that's not a real Red Dog logo. It's just Clifford The Big Red Dog with a tiny Windows Live logo dangling from his collar...

S3 has more than five billion objects currently under management; including for 37Signals, webmail.us, YouOS, ElephantDrive, adaptiveblue, and more. Indeed just this week PollDaddy, the poll app we use at R/WW, reported they'd switched to S3. Polldaddy told us that "the system [S3] is very stable and all polls will now be served off Amazon S3 so there should never be any lag."

Starting October 1st, Amazon introduced a new SLA for S3 guaranteeing users 99.9 percent service uptime. If uptime is less than 99 percent, customers can apply for a service credit of 25 percent of their total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99 percent but less than 99.9 percent, customers can apply for a service credit of 10 percent of their monthly charges.

Once again we're seeing the benefits of Amazon's HaaS (Hardware as a Service) strategy. As Emre Sokullu said in his article, Amazon is leveraging its deep scalability know-how and expertise. It's making web publishing even easier and cheaper - and reliable. This is a real game changer on the Web, especially in this new age of utility computing.