Check out this excellent Windows Azure overview by Dare.

 

The infrastructure looks nice and it makes available a lot of stuff that needed to be configured by hand. But still, the biggest work in making RESTful oriented application in .NET (cloud or no cloud)  is still the mind numbing work required to properly provide support for REST APIs  via proper error messages etc. Right now the work for parsing XML messages will have to be done by hand (LINQ for XML helps) if you care about your document format (which you should); and the XSD only validation support in .NET is disappointing. This is where Mono comes the rescue with its RELAXNG support (including Compact Syntax) 

element card {
  element name { text },
  element email { text }
}

instead of the mind numbing exercise of editing XSD or yet another XML based document validation markup.

There are still a big room of opportunity for less suck DocumentValidation/DataQuery technology on the XML front.  If you ever dealt with document heavy architecture like what I’ve been doing for the past 9 months, you’ll realize that document format design is just a small slice of the overall work required to develop a scalable application that play wells with the web.