I had a chat with Jamie http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/ this morning and realised I needed to have a simple set of definitions associated with the Cloud offerings from Microsoft . I was fairly happy where I am looking at azure and SDS but I started getting confused with some of the terminology so even if this is just for me I felt it worth doing and I've kept the definitions short there are plenty of longer ones to be found if you need them:
Live Mesh - A cloud service that allows you to synchronise and access your files .
Live Platform - An umbrella to cover a number of mostly web apps and services
Live Services - consists of Windows Live Platform / Live Framework / Live Mesh. Essentially a set of building blocks for handling user data and application resources
Live Services are where Mashups hang out
Mashups - Applications that combine data/ content from several sources into a single integrated application ( There are some really cool ones out there as well)
Live Framework - a uniform way for programming Live Services
Azure services platform - A cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft Data centers providing an O/S and set of services
Windows® Azure - is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform
Microsoft SQL Services - An extension of the capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server into the cloud as a Web-based, distributed relational database
Microsoft .NET Services - Provides access control to help secure your applications, a service bus for communicating across applications and services, and hosted workflow execution
The above are very basic simple definitions just to help clarify things somewhat .