The world’s three largest cloud providers are at each others’ throats again after a series of updates that hasn’t proven quite as intensive as January’s industry-wide price war, but serves as a reminder that the competition is hotter than ever.

Just as in the previous skirmish, it was Google that fired the opening shot, this time with the addition of support for CoreOS  to the Google Compute Engine. The lightweight operating system is one of the newest Linux flavors on the market and does away with many of the features available in other distros for the sake of efficiency. Most notably, the platform utilizes the Docker containerization engine to run applications instead of a traditional hypervisor like KVM.

The combination of its low storage footprint and razor sharp performance focus makes CoreOS ideal for running large-scale clusters, which has led Google to to set it as the new default image type in the GCE panel.  But while the search giant may be making gains on the technical side, Amazon continues to dominate the cloud with a 83 percent share of the market, according to Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for infrastructure-as-a-service.

The retail giant has grown its lead over runner-up CSC but faces increased competition from Satya Nadella’s Microsoft, which has finally made it into the Leaders category after years among the Visionaries. The software maker is determined to maintain its momentum, even if it means putting aside bitter rivalries.

In that spirit, the company on Thursday officially teamed up with Salesforce.com to provide Azure users direct access to the CRM juggernaut’s platform as well as the ability to store customer data in SharePoint Online and OneDrive. Salesforce, meanwhile, will begin using Microsoft’s cloud to develop and test its ExactTarget marketing tools, CEO Marc Benioff said.

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