I am attending the Microsoft Azure pre-day session and one of things that have really struck me is how quickly new features are added to this cloud platform. This shows that the old way of doing IT is gone and that infrastructure and Operations can not and should not be bottle neck to get a project done.
We should be able to deliver machines fully functional resources to developers the same day that was requested. Remember if you do not have a bullet proof process to do deployments on premises you are going to have a lot of trouble doing this on the Azure or any other cloud provider. Do not move a pile of garbage from place A to Place B.
One of the new cool things is Azure Resource Manager and this is way of the future. In a nutshell, it is a way to group all the resources that you have to support a project. You can also assign a billing label to that resource group.
Gabe's Blog 