[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.]

Today, at the MIX 2011 keynote, Scott Guthrie will be announcing the first release of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service and a release of a new version of the Access Control service.  (Press Release)

The new version of the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control service adds all of the great capabilities that provide a Single-Sign-On experience to applications by integrating with standards-based identity providers, including enterprise directories such as Active Directory, and web identities such as Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.  With this investment, Microsoft is leading the adoption of HTML5 with a long-term commitment to the standards process.

There are some great updated and expanded offers going live today that I highly recommend you take advantage of: Windows Azure Introductory Special Offer, which includes 750 hours of extra small instances plus 25 hours of small instances of the Windows Azure service plus 20 GB of storage plus 50K of storage transactions plus 40 GB of data transferes provided each month at no charge until September 30, 2011.  The offer is available in all 41 countries where the Windows Azure platform is supported. More information can be found here.  MSDN subscribers can find out about their updated offer here.  The Cloud Essentials Pack for Microsoft partners also has had an upgrade, too.

The full detailed article is on the Windows Azure blog: Announcing the Commercial Release of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching and Access Control – Check it out.

-Steve