Microsoft has announced that the August preview release of a component of its Windows Azure AppFabric cloud computing platform adds support for federated identity and single sign-on. The announcement was made in a blog post by Justin Smith, a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) program manager on the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) team, on Wednesday. The ACS update should be good news for developers and service providers working on applications meant to run on Windows Azure and Windows Server as it also enables access control as a service for federating identities.