Cloud computing inched another step forward at Amazon.com Inc.’s action-packed re:Invent 2014 conference in Las Vegas last week with the introduction of several landmark new services.

Leading the additions is Lambda, a sandbox aimed at allowing developers to easily write and deploy individual functions for handling specific tasks without getting bogged down in managing the underlying hardware resources. The service is designed for processing specific events such as database edits and only generates a bill upon the successful completion of functions, which significantly lowers the barrier to entry for cases that don’t require continuous access to compute and storage capacity.

Amazon’s ability to consistently find a way to one-up the competition has a snowball effect, extending its lead in the public cloud and thus drawing more partners into the fray, whose solutions only grow that momentum further. A case in point is NetApp Inc., which used re:Invent to reveal plans to bring two of its most important software solutions to Amazon Web Services (AWS) a bid to help its customers take better advantage of the platform.

The first offering NetApp is bringing to the table is a standalone version of the ONTAP operating system that powers its on-premise appliances. This provides a unified file- and block-level access layer that makes it easier to accommodate different types of workloads in the same environment. An even bigger benefit is that deploying the software in the public cloud allows NetApp customers to have a common storage management platform across both their on- and off-premise environments, which enables new ways to harness the flexibility of Amazon’s pay-as-you-go model.

One use case that fits particularly well into that model is data protection, which the storage vendor is promising to simplify with a second solution that it’s bringing to AWS: the SteelStore backup technology. Together. the launches enable NetApp to recover some value from the growing trend of organizations moving processes into the cloud and eroding its hardware revenue.

Microsoft also hopes to harness that trend with the next release of its hosted development platform, which was unveiled shortly before NetApp jumped on the Amazon bandwagon and will include two new services for managing cloud applications. Microsoft unveiled the update in conjunction with plans to open-source .NET in a bid to extend the reach of the development framework to the majority of cloud servers running on Linux.

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