Processing Large Amount of Data using Cloud Computing

I am working on a project where I need to process about millions of transaction and I am looking for cloud computing solution which can help me with that. I am a C# programmer so I was wondering is Azure my best choice? Or anyo开发者_如何学Gone has any recommendations or a book/site to start with?

Many thanks, Andy,

You should definetly read something about Hadoop: http://hadoop.apache.org/
Recomended book: http://www.amazon.com/Hadoop-Definitive-Guide-Tom-White/dp/0596521979
Commercial version: http://www.cloudera.com/

It provides framework for processing large amounts of unstructured data (MapReduce) (for example logs), and this is very mature solution used by Yahoo, Facebook and many more: http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/PoweredBy
Pure SQL is avaiable with Hive,
Jobs can be written in C# using streaming mode, Hadoop has native Java API.

Amazon provides Hadoop hosting on cloud with Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR): http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/