It’s been a particularly eventful past week in the cloud ecosystem, with Box finally making its IPO filing public nearly three months after submitting the initial paperwork to the SEC. The online storage provider did not disclose the number of shares to be sold in the offering or the projected price range for the stock, but did say that it’s seeking to raise $250 million.

Box spent $46 million on engineering and another $171 million on sales and marketing in the year ending January 2014, according to its prospectus, but only generated $124 million in revenue, up from $58.8 million in 2013. If everything goes according to plan, the IPO will give the company sufficient financial lift to continue along its aggressive growth trajectory until it breaks even.

Box also noted in its filing that it faces fierce rivalry from the likes of Dropbox and Microsoft, as well as the traditional data center vendors that it has set out to disrupt. But while it may be more crowded, the cloud locker space is not nearly as competitive as the platform-as-a-service market. Google’s latest round of double-digital prices is a case in point. The search giant last Wednesday lowered the rates it charges for compute and storage by 32 percent and 68 percent, respectively, and slashed on-demand BigQuery costs by a massive 85 percent.

Less than 48 hours later, market leader Amazon fired back by chopping 51 percent off the costs of its Simple Storage Service (S3), with discounts ranging from 36 percent to 65 percent depending on the tier. The company also reduced EC2 pricing by 30 percent to 38 percent for M3 and C3 instances and 10 percent to 40 percent for previous generation M1, M2 and C1 deployments. Meanwhile, the prices of Amazon RDS, ElastiCache and EMR also plummeted double-digits as a response to the BigQuery drop.

photo: Stephanie Massaro via photopin cc