Last week saw the rivalry among the giants of the infrastructure-as-a-service world intensify even further after the release of several new price cuts and features from Amazon Inc., most notably an option for customers to use their own encryption keys for data in its object storage service. That ticks another key item off the privacy checklist for the enterprise.

The added control of using custom cryptography comes at the expense of added administrative overhead, but that’s more than worthwhile for banks and other organizations with strict security requirements to meet that need to take extra precautions when handling user data. The update comes as a response to an increased focus on key management from rivals such as Microsoft.

The software giant introduced an encryption service for its competing public cloud only a few months ago, but that is not to say CEO Satya Nadella is limiting his competitive efforts to security. The proof of that came in the form of a massive counter-barrage of updates last week, including the acquisition of application management provider called BlueStripe Software Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

The deal buys Microsoft capabilities for monitoring and troubleshooting applications spread out across multiple public clouds and on-premise environments, the use case at the heart of its grand infrastructure-as-a-service strategy. And the technology with which Redmond hopes to execute that plan is Docker, although the lightweight virtualization engine is not ready for that quite yet.

Containers currently lack many of the essential features needed to run cloud applications at an enterprise scale, not the least of which is scheduling functionality to  balance the requirements of multiple workloads contending for the same infrastructure. That’s the gap AppFormix Inc. hopes to fill with the homegrown software it introduced the day before Microsoft announced its latest purchase.

The engine monitors container clusters for workloads that monopolize hardware resources and automatically issues an alert about the issue. The administrator at the receiving end can take corrective action using a built-in policy enforcement mechanism that makes it possible to set limitations on the consumption patterns of each process based on considerations such as their importance to everyday business operations.