The competition in the public cloud continued unabated last week despite the looming holiday break with a renewed focus on price cuts, the historical bread and butter of the top providers’ differentiation efforts. Amazon Inc. fired the first shot with the launch of a new instance type that accumulates credits when left idle to let customers carry over unused processing capacity to occasions when it’s needed.

The arrangement provides a significantly higher bang for the buck than regular configurations that the company  hopes will help draw developers away from DigitalOcean Inc., which has made major gains in recent quarters on the back of its affordable entry-level instances. With a virtual processor and 536 megabytes of memory plus rollover credits priced as low as $2.10 a month, the t2.nano should be able to put up quite a fight, but Amazon still has many other threats to worry about.

Google Inc. followed retail-turned-cloud-giant into the price optimization fray last week with the introduction of a new usage control mechanism for its managed BigQuery database that allows customers to implement daily caps in order to avoid unexpected cost overruns. Quotas can be set for both projects and individual users, which makes it possible to ensure a single worker doesn’t accidentally burn through their entire team’s budget. The functionality should come particularly handy for large organizations with a lot of employees to manage, the same segment Microsoft Corp. is targeting with the latest changes to Office 365.

The main beneficiary of the update is Outlook, which is receiving a new recommendation feature that can provide contact suggestions when a user hovers their cursor over the recipient field of an email draft. The service will customize the results according to the specific communications habits of every worker, including which colleagues they message the most.

Photo via Alexis