This past week featured several major highlights, the most newsworthy of which was the analyst summit that EMC and VMware co-hosted in New York a few days ago. The event focused on Pivotal Initiative, the two firms’  joint cloud venture.  Executives from both companies attended the event and revealed new details about the company: it will be assigned a total of 1,250 workers from EMC and VMware, and it will be valued at around $300. SiliconAngle founding CEO John Furrier was the first to report the news.

Also this past week, an emerging startup by the name of SwiftStack secured $6 million in Series A funding from Mayfield Fund and two other VCs. The San Francisco-based firm sells a modified version of OpenStack that allows enterprises to deploy AWS-grade private cloud environments on-premise. This software-defined approach to abstracting the data center allows customers to overhaul their legacy infrastructure without doing a rip and replace, or hire a fleet of engineers to handle the transition.

The past few days were all about Amazon. SwiftStack made a splash in the VC scene with its homegrown S3 substitute, and a site called dropdropbox.com made headlines at SxSW 2013. The landing page is the brainchild of Ron Yokubaitis, an entrepreneur who doesn’t like the fact that Dropbox relies on S3 to manage and store its users’ files.  He doesn’t like a lot of things about Dropbox – admittedly because it competes with his startup.

Amazon, meanwhile, announced that it has added Node.js support to Beanstalk. That’s great news for web developers that are using the app automation platform: Node.js is an increasingly popular language that has a lot to offer, including rich libraries and consistency between back- and front-end components.