The war for the public cloud continues apace. Days after Amazon.com Inc. rolled out the latest batch of improvements to its dominant infrastructure-as-a-service platform, rivals are hitting back with their own upgrades in the opening skirmish of 2015.

Microsoft fired the opening salvo with the launch of three additional services on Azure, beginning with new G-Series instances that beat out the retail-turned-cloud giant’s C4 machines as the biggest on the market. Users can now have up to 32 virtual processors, 448 gigabytes of memory and 6.59 terabytes of flash storage in a single server, which Redmond boasts puts it on top across all three categories.

Joining the new instances are Docker-integrated Ubuntu images and Azure Key Vault, a managed alternative to the on-premise hardware security modules that have traditionally handled encryption in the enterprise based on technology originally developed for Office 365. The service organizes data in a reverse pyramid hierarchy where the volume of information increases as its sensitivity and the degree of protection decreases.

At the bottom are the private cryptographic keys governing access to applications, which the user has a choice of handling in the software layer or keeping on more regulatory-friendly Thales nShield hardware modules certified up to FIPS 140-2 Level 2 and Common Criteria EAL4+. One tier up are small blobs of slightly less sensitive application that can reach up to 10 kilobytes in size, while the top consists of usage logs that record encryption operations.

The launch levels the playing field against Amazon’s Key Management Service and makes Azure and the partner services running on top more attractive for sensitive workloads requiring a higher standard of encryption than what has been available thus far. Google, meanwhile, is also looking toward machine-generated logs as a means of becoming more competitive against the retail-turned-cloud giant.

The same morning that Microsoft pulled the curtains back on Key Vault, Google launched a utility called Trace into beta with the goal of helping users make their cloud applications run more smoothly. Originally introduced at Google I/O last June, the service displays high-latency requests and allows developers to check how different versions match up against each other in responsiveness to identify potential bugs introduced with new releases.

Trace is a response to Amazon’s CloudWatch, although the latter provides more expansive functionality extending beyond application performance to resource utilization and overall system health. It’s clear that the retail giant’s competitors are still very much in the catchup phase, but the gaps are rapidly closing.

Image by Plamdi via Deviant Art