EC2 and Windows
EC2 is Amazon's "computing in the cloud" infrastructure. Curious, I found this Getting Started page that documents how to bring up a machine in the cloud. It's a bit like rocket science.
Today Microsoft announced Windows Azure, their own cloud computing infrastructure.
I expect Microsoft will nail the tooling part and make it dead simple for anyone to bring up a machine instance in the cloud. I've applied; I'll post when I get to play with it.