The latest round of earnings reports in the public cloud reveals that the balance of power remains largely unchanged among the top providers, but the competitive lines are being redrawn as the emphasis continues to shift beyond infrastructure. That’s better for some than for others.

With its dominant email service and a complementary productivity suite that is gaining traction, Google only stands to gain as the fight moves up the stack. Yet that’s difficult to glean from its fourth quarter performance. The company continued to make the overwhelming bulk of its revenue from advertisements, with cloud income remaining firmly behind the veil of the “Other” category.

Google’s secondary businesses totaled $1.95 billion in the three months ended December 31, up 18.6 percent from the same period last year. That was marginally stronger growth than the 15 percent annual increase it reported across the board, which fell short of what analysts expected.

Since the $1.95 billion figure includes a multitude of other factors besides the firm’s cloud revenue, including mobile and media sales, it’s impossible to reliably estimate exactly how much Google Compute Engine gained in the fourth quarter. But with arch-rival Apple claiming during its own earnings call on Thursday to have “experienced the highest Android switcher rate” in three years, it’s likely that much of that growth came from cloud services.

That preserves the search giant’s position behind Amazon, which continued to lead the pack in the fourth quarter with a 43 percent increase in its own “other” category to $1.67 billion. The bulk of that can be safely assumed to be its infrastructure-as-a-service business. However, the reaffirmation of the retail giant’s dominance came as less of a surprise than its decision to start breaking out financial data about Amazon Web Services (AWS) beginning in the next quarter.

That indicates that the business is nearing the legal revenue disclosure threshold, which shouldn’t come as too big of a shock now that it’s apparently hovering around the $6 billion annual sales mark. But the move also signals a potential first step toward the spin-off that the London-based The Edge Consulting Group, a firm with a reputation for successfully predicting corporate break-ups, expects to take place sometime in 2015.

If the forecast materializes, it could trigger a bidding war that could end up with an outside player taking over AWS and stealing the public cloud’s throne. But regardless of whether or not Amazon will remain whole, competition is set to ramp up considerably this year as the top providers continue upping the ante on both pricing and functionality.