Last week was an especially busy one in the cloud, with not one but two of the industry’s leading infrastructure-as-a-service providers debuting new services to reach more parts of the enterprise. The opening shot, as usual, came from Amazon Inc., which doubled down on developers with the launch of several project management capabilities into general availability.

CodeCommit, the first of the additions, provides a managed environment for collaborating on software that allows developers to sync their work to a centralized repository accessible for their colleagues through CodePipeline, another service that the company introduced last week. It’s a continuous integration tool, likewise offered on a managed basis, that makes it possible to quickly push changes through the various stages of deployment.

Barely a day passed after the launch when Microsoft Corp., the second biggest name in the public cloud, fired back with a major update to its competing infrastructure-as-a-service platform. One of the main highlights is a new feature that allows customers to continuously copy files from on-premise hardware running arch-rival VMware Inc.’s hypervisor to its data centers for safekeeping.

Smart Replication, as the function is dubbed, marks the latest in the big providerss ongoing’ efforts to gnaw away at the virtualization giant’s user base. The addition stands out thanks to automated scaling that allows organizations to keep their workloads replicated to Microsoft’s platform without the need to manually adjust operational parameters as the data volumes grow.

But while Redmond is working to strengthen its cloud-based storage offering, another big industry name is pulling out of that business. EMC Corp. dropped a bombshell last week after announcing the sale of Syncplicity, the Box-like file sharing and collaboration service it gained through the acquisition of the company of the same name three years ago, to private equity big-wig  Skyview Capital.

The sale will enable  the company to focus more resources on its core storage products while giving Syncplicity the necessary independence to maintain competitiveness in the cutthroat world of enterprise file sharing. That’s the official version, anyway. In the grand scheme of things, however, the move could prove as a precursor to EMC divesting an even bigger part of its business:  VMware, which shareholders have been pushing it to spin off for several years now.

Photo via crom shin