Over the last week, the cloud world has witnessed a few important announcements from a couple of major cloud players. There were some new feature releases from Amazon and Microsoft. In addition, Amazon has announced the SAP Business Suite certification on AWS. Also, there was a ‘must read’ post published by Microsoft. Plus, ActiveState has announced about its significant revenue growth from the past year.

Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.

Beginning with the IaaS leader, Amazon has introduced the integration of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). This service allows a user to set up notifications for any RDS instances by creating an Event subscription. Next, Amazon has announced that AWS has been certified to host the SAP Business Suite environment in full production mode. Thus, increases the agility of the business, shorten deployment times, reduces deployment cost and scales up and down as needed.

Furthermore, Amazon has updated the AWS Architecture Centre with a trio of new reference architectures for e-commerce. Each reference architecture includes a detailed system overview, a detailed architectural diagram and a list of the AWS services used in the architecture. Lastly, announced that the AWS CloudFormation has added support for tagging Amazon S3 buckets and Amazon RDS DB Instances, which makes it easy for users to provision and configure a set of related AWS resources.

Microsoft Windows Azure team has published a ‘must read’ paper that provide insights from the Microsoft SQL Engineering and Customer Advisory Teams (CAT) to detail the differences between on-premises SQL Server and Azure SQL Database tuning, monitoring techniques and database performance testing. Microsoft also announced the launch of new simple, responsive sign-in experience across Office 365, Windows Azure and other Microsoft services driven by Windows Azure AD. This new feature helps reduce the number of times users need to sign in and provides the best possible experience across the many desired devices.

Windows Azure has launched a new landing page on Channel 9 for developers to find videos, event recordings, and shows about Windows Azure. These videos help users learn more about Windows Azure. And, their final announcement of the week was about adding of PowerShell Cmdlets to Windows Azure SQL Database. With the added Cmdlets, users can provision a database server, configure firewall rules and create a database with ease.

Another PaaS player, ActiveState has announced that its 2012 revenue increased 40% year over year, while adding headcount. Its full-time employee ranks grew by 33%. Due to growing customer success with Stackato®, the market-leading enterprise private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology.

A lot to catch up next week, stay tuned!