Red Dog: Yet another unannounced Microsoft cloud service

In the Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie regime of "announce no service before it's done," there have been precious few cloud-computing announcements from Microsoft.

That doesn't mean Microsoft is sitting on its software laurels, just waiting for the clouds to pass, however. There are a bunch of still-unannounced Microsoft services in the works from business units all over the company.

One of these, which the LiveSide.Net guys described as a "cloud utility platform," is code-named "Red Dog." According to the LiveSiders, Red Dog, or RD for short, is a project coming out of Amitabh Srivasta's Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team -- one of the four main Microsoft groups charged with hosting, developing and maintaining the various services Redmond churns out.

Unlike other services Microsoft has announced so far, RD is built on a "virtualized computational substrate," according to a help-wanted description cited by the LiveSiders. RD will be "one of the lowest levels of the services software hardware/stack," the job posting said.

The LiveSiders posit that RD might be what Microsoft has up its sleeve to compete with Google App Engine. I am not as sure. I believe Microsoft is working on a hosted app platform for developers, with BizTalk Services and SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) at its heart. In fact, I've heard the codename "Zurich" attached to this Google-App-Engine competitor. But are Red Dog and Zurich one and the same? I think they are different, and all part of the big Microsoft services plan in the sky.