Like the rest of the industry, the movers and shakers of the cloud ecosystem turned their attention to the Microsoft Build summit last week, which saw the software powerhouse introduce a host of new features for its infrastructure-as-a-service platform. The release was headlined by a managed code execution tool that provides the ability to have a pre-defined action automatically carried out when a certain piece of data is received or some other important event occurs in an deployment.

Azure Functions, as a service is called, made its debut alongside new monitoring functionality designed to ease the task of spotting performance issues in a large Azure environment. Administrators can now see how long it takes an application to serve requests in real-time and immediately distinguish traffic that exceeds the median processing time. As a result, the IT department doesn’t have to be notified by users when their organization’s cloud deployment starts acting up, which streamlines the troubleshooting process.

The capability was unveiled against the backdrop of Google Inc. rolling out a similar performance tracking tool for its rivaling public cloud. Dubbed StackDriver, the service sets itself apart from the pack by providing the ability to monitor deployments on both the search engine’s platform and Amazon Web Services through a single interface, a major convenience for joint users. To top it off, it’s also customizable, enabling administrators to have an alert sent to their mobile device when a potential issue is detected in their environments.  

Despite Microsoft and Google’s high-profile announcements, IBM Corp. also managed to grab some headlines in the cloud ecosystem last week with the publication of an online guide on building off-premise applications. It’s made up of several dozen bite-sized articles and videos that cover fundamentals like how to figure out who should be responsible for what part of a project. Big Blue also covers more technical subjects such API design requirements and popular quality assurance methodologies.

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