In what has become an increasingly frequent occurrence over recent months, data management once again emerged as the top priority for the cloud ecosystem last week. It was Google Inc. that put the topic on the agenda with the release of a landmark update to its managed MySQL service that promises to allow for relational records to be processed up to seven times faster than before in certain use cases.

The speed hike is aimed at helping organizations maintain consistent query response times as more data is added to their deployments, which the search giant says can now scale up to 10 terabytes, an equally significant improvement over the previous iteration of the service. The update levels the playing against the competing relational services of Amazon Inc. and Microsoft Corp., providing CIOs with yet another competitive option for storing their growing information troves outside the firewall. But the issue of putting that information to use is still open-ended for many of the companies moving their data to the cloud.

That’s why Redmond made Elastic BV’s popular open-source search suite available through the Azure Marketplace against the backdrop of the update to Google Cloud SQL. The lineup consists of the Dutch startup’s flagship query engine and four complementary tools for analyzing and visualizing results, which have together been downloaded over 40 million times to date. Users can now quickly deploy the software on Microsoft’s infrastructure with a fraction of the effort that was required for manual installation prior to the addition of official support, a convenience that lowers the adoption barrier considerably.

Making third party solutions easily accessible to is one of the several policies underpinning Redmond’s growth plan for Azure, which also encompasses making the platform more interoperable with organizations’ existing infrastructure. The effort passed a new milestone last week after Red Hat Inc. made its data center orchestration framework compatible with the public cloud as part of a broad partnership with Microsoft that was announced six weeks ago. Support for Windows Server and Hyper-V is set to follow suite in the foreseeable future.

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