When Amazon Inc. enters a new market, prices almost always start falling, but usually not with nearly the same abruptness that the online security space experienced last week in the wake of the latest addition to its cloud arsenal. Jeff Bezos’ company now offers free digital certificates for every website and application running on its infrastructure-as-a-service platform, along with automation functionality meant to simplify the verification process.

The rollout is part of an ambitious New Year’s push that saw Amazon undercut the competition on two other fronts over the last few weeks. It first slashed five percent off the hourly rates on three popular instance types, and then introduced an even bigger discount for organizations that only need to run their workloads in specific time intervals. The gambit predictably drew responses from its rivals, which are increasingly looking beyond traditional price cutting strategies to set their platforms apart.

Google Inc. followed up Amazon’s update with the announcement of an effort to make Red Hat Inc.’s middleware stack available for cloud customers who are building large-scale web applications. OpenShift Dedicated packs pre-implemented componentry that removes the need to create complicated features like third party integrations from scratch and thereby frees up programmers to do other work, speeding up delivery times in the process. Developer productivity is also a priority for Microsoft Corp., Amazon’s other top rival in the infrastructure-as-a-service segment, but its efforts were focused elsewhere last week.

Chief executive Satya Nadella revealed plans to donate a billion dollars worth of Azure resources to nonprofits over the next three years under a new program meant to help “improve the human condition and drive new growth equally”. Redmond will give away academic credits as well in order to support research projects that require large amounts of computational power.

Image via Alexis