This week had its fair share of updates from the cloud-based industry, spanning a number of industries that drew interest from stratups and large solution providers alike.

The first one in our round-up is Microsoft. The software giant is looking to grow the audience for its Azure Platform-as-a-Service offering and their decided tactic is to do so by slashing prices. The company lowered the price on its extra small compute package by 20 percent, in hopes of attracting small to medium businesses. The company also introduced a very flexible model that allow customers to trade in three extra small compute hours for one small compute hour.

Slashing rates is a strategy that has been used widely by Amazon Web Services throughout the last couple of years. But, one of its latest updates comes from a different angle on expanding a product’s audience.  AWS customers can now leverage unused EC2 capacity to run Hadoop jobs, and access an automated system that allows them to control how much they will be spending per workload.

Over on the virtualization front, we had a couple of updates as well. Joyent opened up the operating system it originally developed in-house to be the basis for its virtual data center and public cloud offerings under an open-source license. SmartOS, as it’s called, features support for virtualization hooks and non-traditional datacenters powered by technologies such as Juniper Networks’ QFabric, and a number of third party open-source components.

The hypervisor has been referred to as the “only modern OS” developed in the past decade by Joyent CTO Jason Hoffmann, but this emerging offering has a lot of competition to tackle in this market. VMware is the first name to come to mind.

EMC’s virtualization subsidiary has been growing its ecosystem at an accelerating pace, and Nutanix is one of the companies that just aboard this week. The startup launched Complete Cluster, a vCenter cloud-in-a-box offering that puts an emphasis on cutting costs on the long run.