Microsoft Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie on Thursday fired back at Amazon in the ongoing public cloud wars, announcing a set of new capabilities for Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Guthrie showed a variety of new capabilities for Azure during a keynote address on the second day of Microsoft’s Build developer conference. The features  include a new Azure Functions service, which developers can use to set up functions that activate whenever a particular event happens.

Developers don’t have to set up the compute capabilities necessary to run the function, either: Azure handles all of that for them.

It’s a direct competitor to the Amazon Web Services Lambda service, which provides developers with similar functionality. Both services are interesting because they allow developers to create functions in the cloud and run them without having to worry about managing infrastructure, something that’s likely to be seen more often as the public cloud market matures.

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