This week had a few very newsworthy highlights, including the latest from Amazon and VMware, a massive cloud funding round, and a major update about the much-expected Xbox 720.

Amazon lowered the rates for its Reserved Instance service by 28 percent in response to a similar announcement from Rackspace, a competing public cloud provider, just a few weeks earlier.  Reserved Instances are different than the on-demand AWS instances in that the user, usually a company, pays a submittal portion of the projected annual free upfront in exchange for a major discount.

Over at VMware, which competes with Amazon over the enterprise customers that rent Reserved Instances, a prominent C-level executive stepped down. Chief marketing officer Rick Jackson will become the company’s senior vice president of global enablement due to his relocation to Austin, Texas – several thousand miles away from VMware’s Palo Alto headquarters.

While the big vendors are waging their wars across the public cloud and data center, startups are booming. This week an emerging company called Pertino announced that it has closed a $20 million Series B funding round  led by  Jafco Ventures.

Pertino developed a so-called “cloud network engine” that can virtualize a network in a matter of minutes. The solution is much cheaper and simpler than alternative software-defined infrastructure solutions from Intel and Cisco, which are only targeting top paying enterprise clients that don’t mind complexity and cost.

In the consumer cloud space, Microsoft reportedly leaked the specs of its next generation gaming console. The Xbox 720 features an eight-core x64 1.6GHz CPU from AMD that makes it three times as powerful as the 360, and will be available to consumers in two configurations: a 320 GB “Arcade” model and a 500 GB “Pro” edition.  Microsoft said that it may launch in time for this year’s holiday season.