Today Microsoft revealed ID@Azure, a self-service program that hopes to make the company’s Azure cloud services more accessible to indie game developers. The program harkens back to Microsoft’s work on ID@Xbox, which made self-publishing possible on Xbox consoles.

ID@Azure launches this summer and will offer members free access to game development tools, Azure credits that will allow them to try out the program’s services, and best practices implemented by studios under the Xbox Game Studios banner and cloud engineers at Microsoft.

Microsoft claims Azure will work with games built for any platform and on any engine, and should be beneficial to studios with and without experience working with cloud tools.

“With Azure cloud, game creators can build, scale, and operate their game on the global, secure, and reliable Azure cloud,” the company said. “Developers can quickly scale up and down when their needs change, only pay for the resources they use, and let Microsoft manage infrastructure.”

ID@Xbox has been widely praised by developers and was instrumental in getting more indie developers publishing on consoles, so if Microsoft can recreate that with ID@Azure, the program should be very helpful, especially given the importance of cloud gaming in recent years. We’ll likely learn more about ID@Azure closer to the program’s launch this summer.