My posts lately are rather short, but I want to keep 'em informative and would like to move closer to the technology track that I'm working on. Here is the Windows Azure Guidance document, which represents the holystic view on the Microsoft Cloud's vision and the architecture decisions behind the cloud-based applications - http://wag.codeplex.com/releases/view/45438

If you're developing for Microsoft Cloud Services, this might be of interest for the evaluation of the performance and Best Practices concerning running applications in the Cloud:

http://azurescope.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx

Beginning of this year I participated in the CloudSlam'09 conference with the paper devoted to a discussion on how the VM with interfaces to the Cloud can be designed and what are the major benefits of using the different approaches in core components of the virtual machine. You can access the full-text from this paper here.

It appears that alike discussions are moving with fast pace and they are going to be a main topic in the coming conference Storage Developer Conference 2009.