As if more proof was required of how high the stakes have become in the public cloud, Alibaba Holding Group Ltd. pledged to make a ten-figure investment in its infrastructure-as-a-service arm last week to take the fight to competition and build new data centers in three additional continents. The first stop is the U.S. East Coast, followed by Japan, Europe and the Middle East.

The primary target of that aggressive expansion is Amazon Inc., which has been dominating the public cloud ever since bringing the term into the enterprise lexicon a decade ago. Alibaba is not the first to take its shot at dethroning the web giant but boasts several key advantages over its predecessors, most notably a leadership position in China, where its platform is used by some 1.4 million customers.

However, most of those customers are small- and medium-sized businesses with fairly basic hosting needs, which the new billion dollar investment is meant to change. But Amazon isn’t sitting idly while the competition tries to erode its advantage. The cloud giant fired back at Alibaba last week with the launch of a new hosted relational database on its namesake infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Aurora promises to provide five times the price-performance ratio of traditional alternatives like MySQL with comparable service levels thanks to the use of speedy flash storage that enables an instance to handle up to 100,000 write and 500,000 read operations per second. The system is also highly reliable as a result of the fact that information inside is stored in six copies across three different geographic locations to protect against outages.

Not to be left out of the race, IBM Corp. followed up the launch of Aurora with the addition of a new data management option to its own cloud platform that offers many of the same benefits, except for more advanced applications that require combining different kinds of metrics. The dashDB Enterprise MPP service is a scalable incarnation of its in-memory data warehouse that touts greatly increased capacity and native connectors for several key information sources including Twitter.

Photo via Adina Voicu