The Azure platform will have its first paying customers in February 2010, marking Microsoft’s entry into the commercial cloud computing market.

Microsoft plans to transition its Windows Azure cloud computing platform from preview to full production capacity on 1st January next year, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie announced at the annual PDC conference on Tuesday. The service, currently operating as a free Community Technology Preview (CTP), will remain no-cost throughout January; from February 1st it will start accumulating charges. The cost schedule was previously announced in July.

Since its initial announcement at PDC 2008, the Azure CTP has been available to developers to allow them to test and explore the capabilities of the platform. “Tens of thousands of developers have participated in the CTP and you’ve made a tremendous impact on the product,” Ozzie said. The free month will allow this testing to continue; it will also for the first time give developers the chance to preview their usage and learn how much use of the platform will cost once billing starts.

The CTP has thus far included three components: the Windows Azure platform itself, a scalable, manageable Windows environment allowing both .NET and native development, including support for CGI, PHP, and other Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies; SQL Azure, a replicated, fault-tolerate, high-performance version of SQL Server; and AppFabric (formerly known as .NET Services), a collection of web services providing reliable asynchronous communications, message queueing, and other glue infrastructure useful for interoperating with the cloud.