This week platform services were a major highlight, thanks to a few interesting developments surfaced from a number of the more high-ranking cloud vendors.

For starters, Microsoft upgraded Azure with the addition of Node.js support, and rolled out the early product of a previously announced partnership with HortonWorks.  Select developers have access to a preview of Azure Hadoop integration, which includes JavaScript libraries designed for developers leveraging the language to write MapReduce jobs, a Hadoop plugin for Excel and a number of upcoming features such as a cross-platform visibility and monitoring suite.

Cloud Foundry also got an upgrade this week that directly ties in with Azure. The Iron Foundry distribution of VMware’s open PaaS by Tier 3 offers a number of additions to the platform; first and foremost support for .NET. It’s opened up a lot more opportunities for the developers on Microsoft’s framework, some of which could consider switching over from Azure.

While VMware is taking a jab at Microsoft’s PaaS user base, Amazon Web Services is rapidly upgrading its infrastructure in order to support its expansion. Only a month or so after it announced plans to open its seventh data center, the company revealed that the eight facility will be built in Brazil. Amazon is the first major cloud vendor that will be building a datacenter in South America, which is a milestone for the sub-continent. The announcement is recognition of the growing IT market in the region, which already attracted a large number of other major vendors all across the industry.

Jumping back to VMware, the second update concerning it this week comes from HotLink. The software maker made version 1.2 of its SuperVISOR software available. The solution enables companies to manage competing hypervisors from vCenter, and the latest release rolled out a few significant improvements.