One of Microsoft’s confidants says that the Red Dog project that broke cover in a want ad a few months ago is indeed the Kiplingesque pet name for Microsoft’s impending cloud infrastructure – well, at least part of it anyway.

It was described in the ad as virtualized and fully automated with highly scalable storage.

This so-called Microsoft Utility Computing Platform is called “one of the lowest levels of the services software/hardware stack” and is supposedly capable of enabling “services to scale to millions of machines distributed globally throughout Microsoft data centers.”

It is the work of Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team, whose goal, the ad said, was to turn out “the best platform for rapid development, deployment and maintenance of Internet services and applications” at the “lowest operating costs per node.”

With little information to go on the blogosphere initially took the thing for a Google App Engine knockoff but Reuven Cohen, co-founder and CTO of Enomaly Inc, a Canadian start-up with its own open source cloud-enabling Enomalism Elastic Computing Platform, says more recent gossip casts Red Dog as an Amazon-like “EC2 for Windows,” and gives it a launch date of October at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference.