Microsoft has given its new cloud services operating system the name Azure. It’s as if Microsoft Azure is the computing sky that supports your Internet cloud.

From a developer standpoint, Azure will be an open platform in which developers can build applications using Visual Studio (which is already supported) and a host of third-party tools such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

The underlying services are very familiar to network admins and they include Live Services, .Net Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services — all residing on Windows Azure, the cloud services operating system.

Microsoft is certainly putting quite a bit behind Azure with a fancy new Web site and resources that are quite helpful. Resources to support developers and decisionmakers are growing with the online site providing the SDKs for developers to work with it, as well as case studies, white papers, videos, datasheets, and more.

Microsoft isn’t the only one aiming for the clouds. As mentioned earlier, Google Apps is an impressive SaaS solution that includes messaging (with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, etc.); collaboration (with Google Docs, Google Video, and Google Sites); and security for on-premise e-mail. IBM has a very solid reputation for providing both the cloud infrastructure as well as the services and applications.

But neither Google, nor IBM, nor even Microsoft are the kings of cloud computing. Who is? Surprisingly enough, it is Amazon. Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud is the first platform to support Oracle’s database platform.

Well, the one statement Microsoft might be making by calling its product Azure is that it is going to support the clouds rather than be a cloud. For example, the Amazon solution is a proprietary cloud. If you go with a vendor like Amazon to host your technology infrastructure, there is no easy way to pull your infrastructure over to another cloud to back into its own datacenter. There are no standards to moving things around, which is another discussion in and of itself.

Pirated copies of a Windows 7 build pegged by many as the beta Microsoft will release next month have leaked to the Internet, according to searches at several BitTorrent sites today.

A search on the Pirate Bay BitTorrent site, for example, returned two Windows 7 Build 7000 listings, both of which had been posted Friday.

As of Saturday afternoon, one torrent on Pirate Bay showed more than 1,800 “seeders” — the term for a computer that has a complete copy of the torrent file — and about 8,500 “leechers,” or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent. The torrent is a disk image of the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate, Build 7000, according to users commenting on the site and elsewhere on the Internet.

Pirate Bay and other BitTorrent sites, including Mininova, listed the beta build as a 2.44GB download.

This is not the first time Windows 7 has escaped from Microsoft’s limited testing pool. Just hours after the company unveiled an earlier version at its Professional Developers Conference in late October, the alpha edition hit BitTorrent.

Users first reported the newest Windows 7 leak on Neowin.net’s forums Friday, with the opening message and screenshots coming from someone identified as “+fivestarVIP”, who said he was from Beijing, China.

Build 7000 is what Microsoft will issue next month as Windows 7 Beta, according to other reports by Windows bloggers who have copies. Paul Thurrott, for example, posted a review and screenshots of Build 7000 today on his “SuperSite for Windows” site, naming it as the Beta build.

Although Microsoft has promised to open the beta to all users in early 2009, it has been mum on an exact release date. Information published on its own Web site earlier this month, however, hinted that the beta will be available no later than Jan. 13.

Some commentators and bloggers have maintained that Microsoft may release the beta as early as Jan. 7, after CEO Steve Ballmer delivers a keynote that evening at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he is expected to talk about Windows 7.