The cloud spotlight turned back to developers last week after Atlassian Pty. Ltd. upgraded its popular Bitbucket project hosting solution to allow for code to be deployed on infrastructure-as-a-service platforms directly through the native interface. The enhancement marks what is likely the last major product update from the company before its long-anticipated public offering in a few days, which is set to be the biggest the Australian tech scene has ever seen.

Atlassian’s entry to the stock market is the culmination of more than a decade-long effort to simplify the way organizations build applications that reached a new milestone earlier this year with the release of a programming interface for connecting Bitbucket to third party services. The upgrade laid the groundwork for the new cloud integration, which enables the software to work with Amazon Web Services, fast-growing rival DigitalOcean and last but not least, Microsoft Azure. Redmond’s platform received an update of its own last week to help set it apart from the pack in the eyes of developers.

Applications can now be deployed on the public cloud using Docker thanks to a new orchestration service based upon the open-source Apache Mesos framework that promises to automate the creation and maintenance of large clusters. The addition will enable Microsoft to level the playing field against the existing managed implementations of the containerization engine from Amazon Inc. and Google Inc., which also augmented its infrastructure-as-a-service platform last week to better support software projects.

The new Cloud Vision API makes it possible to incorporate object recognition capabilities into applications without having to reinvent the wheel. The offering draws upon the experience Google gained while developing its widely-used image search service to accurately identify everything from text to specific facial expressions, flexibility that holds the potential to facilitate a wide range of new use cases for developers who didn’t have access to such functionality in the past.

Photo via Alexis