The cloud spotlight returned to the development community last week as the major providers expanded their coding arsenals. Pivotal Software Inc. fired the opening round with the introduction of a landmark update to its middleware stack aimed at simplifying the creation of hybrid applications.

The release extends the solution, a commercial version of the open-source Cloud Foundry project, to Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform through a new deployment option that automates most of the work involved in setting up an off-premise implementation. A virtual appliance handles everything from the initial installation onwards and factors usage charges directly into the middleware subscription.

The upgrade underscores the growing importance of having a low entry barrier to winning over developers in the fast-moving world of Web applications. The easier it is to start using a service, the broader the appeal, a competitive reality that Google is also trying to exploit with the latest addition to its public cloud.

Introduced hot on the heels of Pivotal bolstering its middleware stack, the new Google Cloud Launcher borrows a page directly from the platform-as-a-service book to automate the deployment of popular development solutions such as MySQL and Node.js in instances. It’s an answer to DigitalOcean, Inc., which rose to become the world’s third largest hosting provider in just a few years thanks to the low entry barrier of its pre-configured servers.

But it’s not only startups that are battling Google over the hearts and minds of developers. The search giant is also facing stiff competition from fellow tech titans such as Microsoft, which augmented its own public cloud on the morning of the launcher’s debut to better accommodate Web applications.

The aptly-named Azure App Service combines existing integration, hosting and mobile delivery capabilities from the company’s development arsenal into what is described as a unified environment for deploying code in the cloud. That includes everything from regular websites to server-side utilities for carrying out specific supportive functions such as combining different kinds of user-generated information.

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