As Microsoft and Amazon battle for developers, the cloud has one of its biggest days ever

Two tech titans from Seattle headed toward opposite sides of the country yesterday to deliver some big news for the cloud.

Amazon landed in Las Vegas for its third annual AWS re:Invent conference. The conference has more than doubled in size, from 6,000 attendees in its first year, to 13,500 this week. That’s just one metric by which you can measure the impact the cloud is having, as well as the success of Amazon Web Services.

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In a keynote yesterday, the company made a series of announcements related to AWS. But more importantly, Amazon executives stressed that the cloud is now the default way companies do business. Amazon claimed AWS is growing 40% year-over-year, using one of its famous slides that don’t include the actual numbers.

“The business is growing really quickly,” said AWS senior vice president Andy Jassy during the keynote. “We have over a million customers using AWS. More and more companies are moving their underlying business to the cloud and AWS.”

As big as this event is, Microsoft still managed to steal a bit of Amazon’s thunder by hosting its Connect() developer event in New York City the same week. The company unveiled a bunch of new tools and services for developers. Of course, the real stunner was its announcement that it would open source the .NET framework.

Like Amazon, Microsoft execs emphasized that this shift was all part of its expanded focus on the cloud. It wants to help developers write and deploy applications quickly across many platforms and devices.

Even though Microsoft is now run by Satya Nadella, the former head of its cloud division, the latest developments are one more surprising break with the company’s past, where it was all about getting people onto the Windows platform.

It’s also a clear sign of where computing is heading.

“We now live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group, at the event’s keynote. “In the cloud, every developer all around the world can now build experiences that can reach millions of users with no upfront cost and using a cloud infrastructure that provides truly global reach. The impact that an individual developer can have today has never been greater.”