Since the cost of hardware is declining at more or less the same rate across the entire industry, the top cloud providers increasingly have to look beyond price-cutting in order to set themselves apart. The trend saw Amazon Inc. venture into the gaming world last week with the launch of a new homegrown development engine designed to facilitate the creation of big-budget AAA titles on its infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Lumberyard attempts to stand out from the crowd with an accommodating licensing model that doesn’t require a studio to provide royalties from successful projects the way alternatives such as Unity and Unreal Engine 4 do. The catch is that the engine only works on Amazon Web Services, which means migrating a game to a rivaling public cloud would necessitate completely reworking its internals. However, the company recons that developers won’t worry too much about the lock-in so long as its platform continues to lead the competition in pricing and functionality.

Jeff Bezos’ firm is currently by far the biggest provider in terms of revenue, but its edge is becoming more difficult to maintain as other fast-growing players like Google Inc. invest aggressively to narrow the gap. The search giant followed up the debut of Lumberyard with the introduction of a service called Cloud Functions that is positioned as a direct competitor to Lambda, one of the most popular developer services on Amazon’s platform. Operations professionals can use the new addition to write compact event processing scripts that are only run when they’re needed, an approach that has the potential to save a lot of resources when it comes handling sporadically-flowing data.

The fierce competition among the top cloud providers predictably dominated the headlines last week, though Fuze Inc. (formerly ThinkingPhones) also managed to land a spot in the limelight after announcing that it’s completed a mammoth $112 million funding round. The capital will help fund the development of new features for its cloud-based communications suite, which covers everything from worker collaboration to help desk automation. The functionality is topped off by an analytics extension that allows organizations to analyze internal interactions in order to identify opportunities to improve employee productivity.

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