This week, Microsoft announced that a leading provider of cloud-based automation software added its solution to the Azure marketplace, and Amazon revealed that it has allied with GE to analyze sensory data from a wide range of devices in AWS. WANdisco also got a spot in the limelight after it launched its S3-enabled analytics platform, and Dropbox and Certify announced a partnership to make the cloud more secure for business users.

Microsoft and Engine Yard made the latter’s popular Ruby on Rails automation solution available for Windows Azure users. The agreement is a major victory for Microsoft because it evens the playing field with AWS, HP Cloud Services and other Azure rivals that added support for Engine Yard’s platform as early as 2011.

The ecosystem is a massive source of value creation for cloud vendors, especially if your name happens to be Amazon. The firm recently announced that it joined forces with General Electric to usher in the Industrial Internet, a term that describes the gathering and analysis of real time sensory data from billions of devices. GE’s defines a device as anything that transmits data over the web, whether a parking meter or a state-of-the-art commercial airplane.

While General Electric and Amazon are trying to bring Big Data to the cloud, a company called WANdisco is offering Hadoop users the opposite. The newest version of WANdisco Distro (WDD) is S3-enabled, which means that users can access all the features of Amazon’s file storage service in their private data centers.

The last update in this list comes from Dropbox. The cloud locker provider teamed up with Certify to embed single sign-on (SSO) functionality into its flagship platform.