It’s official, Apple has its head in the clouds.

Apple announced their new cloud based service, aptly named the iCloud, during their keynote address at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The iCloud service will allow users to automatically store and share content such as music, photos, calendars and digital books wirelessly across multiple iOS devices.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs took to the stage in his trademark black turtleneck to make the announcement.

“iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices,” said Jobs. “All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it, it all just works.”

iCloud takes any content updates made on one device, such as uploading a photo taken on an iPhone, and then wirelessly pushes that content onto any other devices linked to the same account, such as the iPad or iPod Touch.

Apple announced that the service will extend specifically to devices using iOS 5 or Mac OS X Lion, including the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Macintosh computers and PCs.

The service will launch with free online cloud storage of up to 5GB, but Apple noted in a press release following the address that this limit is, “for mail, document storage and backup” and that “purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream do not count against the storage limit.”

Photo Stream is a part of the iCloud service that will be built into existing photo apps on all iOS devices, allowing for online cloud storage of up to 1,000 photos at a time, however individual pictures will be removed from online cloud storage after 30 days.

The iCloud service will fully launch this fall alongside the iOS 5 operating system as a free service, though further details in the announcements did reveal some possible costs.

Users will be able to purchase storage beyond the 5GB limit but Apple did not state specifically what the purchasing options will be beyond that they would be made public in the fall alongside the release of the service.

Further announcements concerning how iCloud handles music revealed that only music bought through iTunes is eligible for the service, meaning any non-iTunes music would still have be manually uploaded to each device unless users purchase a new service called iTunes Match.

For an annual fee of $24.99, iTunes Match scans a device’s music library for any non-iTunes music files and converts them into an iTunes equivalent available on the iCloud service, automatically making those songs available across all devices attached to a users account.

As part of the new manner in which iCloud handles music, Apple also announced a new service that builds off their existing iTunes music service.

The new service named iTunes in the Cloud will take existing iTunes accounts and make all songs purchased through those accounts, along with any future purchases, available for download on all iOS devices attached to that account for no extra cost.

iTunes in the Cloud is currently available free to all iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users running iOS 4.3, though it is only a work-in-progress beta version and does not currently carry the iTunes Match service.

The iCloud service is intended to allow for easy backup and recovery across all iOS enabled devices.

If a user has to restore their device, replace the device or have some form of maintenance done to the device, iCloud’s online storage system will allow the user to easily recover all apps, digital books, music and other data back onto that device.

The iCloud service also contains a new app called Documents which allows for users to take documents from Apple office products, such as word documents and using cloud storage, and push that document from one iOS device to all others attached to the same account automatically.

Apple has only revealed Documents functionality with Apple office programs, meaning the app may not function with programs such as Microsoft Word or PowerPoint.

The announcement outlined that Apple is reworking current purchasing services so that a purchase on one device will automatically place that content on all other devices under the same account.

The announcements validated a myriad of rumors that began circulating after GigaOm reported in April that Apple had bought the domain name iCloud.com, reportedly at a cost of $4.5 million from its previous owner Xcerion.