The public cloud saw a spike in activity last week as both emerging providers and established names stepped up their fight over infrastructure spending amid growing interest from new types of buyers. Google provided the initial push with the release of a service that promises to provide visibility into applications running on competing platforms.

The launch comes eight months after the search giant acquired Stackdriver, Inc. for its cross-cloud analytics technology, which underpins the new capability. Google Cloud Monitoring tracks everything from operational parameters, such as performance and availability, to high-level business metrics pertaining to how users interact with applications, functionality that should help level the playing field against Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The service is currently only available on Google’s cloud, but support for Amazon’s platform as well as others is already in the works, according to the blog post that announced the launch.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’ infrastructure empire got some good news of its own as Cloudian Inc. revealed a partnership with the newly public Hortonworks Inc. to make it easier for customers to process data on AWS. The startup’s platform can now expose Amazon’s low-cost object store to Hadoop environments through a straightforward interface that also provides access to on-premise infrastructure, allowing organizations to carry out analytics regardless of where their information is stored.

The landmark update from Cloudian came as DigitalOcean, another fast-growing cloud player, also expanded the choice of technologies available to its customers with the addition of support for FreeBSD. The operating system is not as popular as Linux but offers several notable advantages, such as a native container engine that can run different distributions inside instances and what some perceive as a more mature code base.

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