The cloud ecosystem marked a major milestone last week after Twilio Inc. became the first software-as-a-service provider to file for a public offering since the start of the year. The move sends an encouraging signal to other tech firms that are also looking to hit the stock market but have been holding off their plans for fear of lackluster interest from Wall Street.

However, it’s not time to pop the champagne quite yet. Twilio will likely face difficulties attracting investors due to the fact that it’s not yet profitable and isn’t on track to leave the red anytime soon. SecureWorks Inc., the only other loss-making tech company that held a public offering this year, missed its funding target by a significant margin after failing to impress investors. However, there are some differences between the companies that provide reason for optimism.

Most notably, SecureWorks increased revenues by only 27 percent in 2015 while Twilio saw demand for its managed communications service jump a massive 88 percent during the same period. That beats the growth rate of even Amazon Inc.’s market-leading cloud division, although the latter is admittedly expanding from a much bigger revenue base. Case in point, the company last week scored a $400 million contact to host Salesforce.com’s Inc.’s core services.

The roster features the company’s flagship customer relationship management platform and nearly half a dozen complementary portfolios, including its analytics lineup. For Amazon, the deal not only represents a valuable new revenue source but also an important victory over rivals such as Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc., which are hard at work trying to erode its market share. As part of the effort, the search giant last week released an upgrade to its container hosting service that promises to significantly improve the efficiency of Docker clusters.

Users can now have each part of a deployment configured differently to ensure they’re making the most out of the hardware they rent from Alphabet. For  instance, a company might have the orchestration element of an application relegated to a performance-optimized virtual machine while keeping  everything else on cheaper instances. The resulting savings can add up quickly in a large environment with upwards of thousands of containers.

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