The cloud took another twist on its evolutionary path last week after Microsoft Corp. pledged to bring one of the open-source community’s most promising management projects to Windows as part of its efforts to address the spread of the infrastructure-as-a-service model behind the firewall. The integration is a natural continuation of its earlier plans to add support for containers.

Mesos, as the project is called, abstracts away hardware under a programmatic interface through which applications can request processing power, storage capacity and bandwidth as needed on an automated basis. That’s considerably easier and more efficient than traditional approaches, the same benefits standing behind the meteoric rise of containers.

Making Mesos available on Windows Server will put Microsoft in a that much stronger position to accommodate the needs of the organizations trying to transition away from the old way of running their infrastructure, which until now had no better choice of a platform on which to implement that vision than Linux. Providing choice is the same goal driving Dropbox Inc’s parallel efforts in the open-source ecosystem.

The cloud storage giant made headlines two days after Redmond’s move with the release of its Hackpad collaborative note-taking application under a free license. The software, which Dropbox gained through its acquisition of the startup of the same name last April, provides the same kind of sharing functionality available on its platform for developers to modify and implement in their own services as they see fit.

Open-source software isn’t all there is to the cloud, however. The proprietary side of the aisle also received some limelight last week after AlienVault Inc. raised a hefty $52 million in funding from a group of big-name investors to flesh out its security management service. It’s a combination of traditional monitoring functionality and a free threat intelligence feed that aggregates information about hacker activity for organizations to incorporate into their defenses.

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