Last week saw the major infrastructure-as-a-service providers return to the center of attention in the wake of a new round of feature rollouts that upped the ante another few notches for the public cloud. Google Inc. led the charge with the launch of an unconventional consumption option that allows users to purchase spare capacity in its data centers at massive discounts.

The catch is that the search giant can reclaim that infrastructure anytime within the 24-hour maximum period of allowed use for deployments depending on its need, at which point any applications running on top are automatically paused. That limits the appeal of the model to projects with flexible deadlines such as historical analysis jobs and video encoding, which has emerged as an unexpected flash point in the public cloud.

Microsoft Corp. added a service for processing real-time media feeds to its rivaling platform only two days after Google’s update and less than a week after Amazon Inc., their mutual competitor, acquired one of the top players in that space for $400 million. Both will concentrate mainly on helping customers repurpose traditional video formats for distribution across different kinds of devices, which is handy in use cases like broadcasting live sport events.

The cloud giants share their focus on cross-platform interoperability with Salesforce.com Inc., which also made a splash last week with the release of a new application development environment that meshes its popular platform-as-a-service stack and customer relationship management system. The idea is to help organizations make the information they store on its infrastructure accessible in new forms to users.

That includes both their own employees and external parties such as partners and suppliers, which is where the ability to tailor the way the data is exposed becomes truly useful. An enterprise hardware vendor could leverage the new platform to create separate lead viewing clients for its internal salespeople and resellers customized to the respective requirements of each.

Photo via Sipa