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Windows Azure provides three core components, Compute, Storage and the Fabric, along with the Fabric controller. Compute is effectively the Windows operating system, this is an instance. These instances contain a copy of your application. Instances also come in two flavours, a Web Role or a Worker Role. Web roles accept and process HTTP requests using IIS. Not everything you may want to run in Windows Azure is a Web application, so Windows Azure also provides Worker roles. A Worker role instance is quite similar to a Web role instance. The key difference is that a Worker role does not have IIS preconfigured to run in each instance. Web and Worker roles can communicate with each other via technologies like WCF, or using Windows Azure Storage queues.

Windows Azure platform Appfabric Windows Azure platform AppFabric is made up of two components, Service Bus and Access Control. Before going into these two components it’s worth noting that there is also a product called Windows Server platform Appfabric, currently these two “Appfabric” products are different, however they are the same product teams within Microsoft and their product roadmap includes closer synergy over time.

Ning within our platform provides a whole suite of APIs for easily building social networking applications; Salesforce within its platform provides a whole suite of APIs for easily building enterprise applications; Second Life within its platform provides a whole suite of APIs for easy building objects that live and interact within Second Life. EC2, at least for now, has no such ambitions, and is content to be more of a generic hosting environment.

Akamai, coming from a completely different angle, is tackling a lot of the technical requirements of a Level 3 Internet platform in their "EdgeComputing" service -- which lets their customers upload Java code into Akamai's systems.

Amazon's FPS -- Flexible Payments Service -- is itself a Level 3 Internet platform.