Last week witnessed a familiar sight in the public cloud after Amazon Inc. slashed the rate on its long-term storage service by a hefty 30 percent to $0.007 per gigabyte per month. The cut highlights a renewed focus on archiving that previously saw Google Inc. launch a promotion offering organizations the ability to park 100 petabytes of data on its platform for free.

The six-month credit was meant to draw attention to its rivaling archiving service, which sets itself apart from Amazon’s with a more robust architecture that makes it possible to retrieve data in minutes rather than hours. But that edge is nullified by the new storage tier that the retail giant debuted in conjunction with the price cut, which offers near-instant data access for a slight premium.

Not wanting the competition to soak all the limelight, Microsoft Corp., the third major name in the public cloud, joined the fray the next day with the announcement of a custom Linux-based network operating system developed internally to handle traffic on its infrastructure-as-a-service platform. The news managed to raise eyebrows among those who might have expected Redmond to use its own software for such a key operational requiremnet.

But Microsoft’s decision to choose Linux over Windows doesn’t come as nearly as big of a surprise as it might have under the previous leadership given CEO Satya Nadella’s aggressive efforts to reconcile with the open-source community. It was only a few months ago that the company debuted a fully functioning cross-platform version of its once-proprietary .NET development framework at its annual developer conference.

Microsoft shares its enthusiasm about open-source software with quite a few other vendors, both large and small. One of the latest addition to the club is a startup called Nexenta Systems Inc. that last week revealed plans to integrate its software-defined storage platform with Flocker, a community-developed tool that helps automate the process of provisioning capacity for containers. With interest in the emerging virtualization format spreading rapidly among enterprises, the timing couldn’t be any better.

Photo via Adina Voicu