The public cloud returned to its roots last week after Amazon Inc. rolled out a dedicated hosting option that allows users to rent out entire servers in its data centers for the first time. The service is offered as an alternative to regular virtual instances for organizations that wish to make use of software licenses originally bought to run on their private infrastructure, which are often priced based on the number of physical processing cores and network ports in a deployment.

Falling into that category are popular operating systems such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Windows Server as well practically all of the leading proprietary relational databases. The addition puts Amazon another step ahead in the value-added feature arms race that has taken over the public cloud, but the competition is working hard to catch up. Word broke a day after the announcement of the new dedicated hosting service that Microsoft Corp. has struck a landmark partnership with the newly independent Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to jointly promote its rivaling infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

The deal comes less than a month after the data center giant revealed that it’s pulling the cord on its homegrown public cloud after failing to meet growth expectations. Microsoft is now stepping up to fill the gap, a role that it will probably end up having to share with Amazon and the other major providers Hewlett-Packard Enterprise likely plans to support in the future to provide customers more freedom of choice. It’s the same platform-agnostic strategy that has been adopted by Dell Inc., which also managed to make headlines in the public cloud last week.

Insiders revealed to the press that the company’s planned acquisition of EMC Corp. has led to a major change of plans for the latter’s Virtustream infrastructure-as-a-service business, which was originally slated to be spun off alongside a number of other assets to form a new joint venture with VMware Inc. The storage giant will now instead retain a majority stake in the division and thereby assume its losses to elevate the concerns from the hypervisor maker’s shareholders, who reportedly raised concerns that the added risk of the venture would further worsen the decline that its stock has seen since the announcement of the merger last month.

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