The past week featured a handful of notable cloud news items, with the first one coming from Microsoft’s direction. The software maker has been gradually pushing into mobility and the cloud with Windows Phone 7 and Office 360. Now it’s fleshing out Azure, its PaaS.

With the newest upgrade the platform will be getting is Linux support coupled with the ability to run VMs on Microsoft’s AWS competitor stably. This addresses data integrity issues customers raised about Azure, which already offered support for virtual machines. The first test-build persistent VM on Azure is scheduled to arrive sometime around spring this year.

There are all kinds of cloud-based services that cater to developers. One of them is Green Hat’s quality assurance solution, which appealed to IBM. The Big Blue announced yesterday that it has acquired the UK firm for an undisclosed amount, a decision driven partially by the rather extensive support for IBM tools Green Hat has included. This makes the integration much smoother from an R&D perspective.

The third highlight this week is from Nimble, a small startup that raised $1 million in seed funding from investors including Google’s VC branch. Nimble offers a CRM platform that jumped on the consumerization of IT trend bandwagon from the get-go, wrapping up the CRM functionality with social media and cloud economics. A release revealed that this approach has been paying off, attracting several tens of thousands of users in a relatively short time span.

On the consumer end, music took the spotlight. SoundCloud received $50 million in fresh capital from Kleiner Perkins, which is in and of itself a big boost to this $200 million industry. SoundCloud is competing with several veterans in this industry that have been around for quite some time, including Spotify and Pandora.