A new battleground is emerging for cloud providers looking to outshine the competition, and you only have to look up to find it. No, not the sun, don't look at that. I'm talking about the thousands of satellites that crisscross our skies. This is where Amazon and Azure and are waging battle.

Microsoft today announced Azure Space, an initiative that will see the company take the cloud into orbit.

The cloud provider operates a global network with more than 160,000 miles of subsea, terrestrial, and metro optical fiber that services millions of people around the world. But Azure Space is about serving the next big market: those people and things operating beyond the reach of traditional networks — think remote IoT, maritime vessels, oil, and gas.

"Many of our customers also operate in remote, rugged, environments and find it hard to keep pace with their increasing need for access to data and bandwidth," wrote Tom Keane, VP of Azure Global in a blog post, adding that satellite connectivity is the answer.

This isn't a new idea by any means. While rockets like SpaceX's Starship — a massive ship that a few years from now could ferry as many as a hundred people to orbit, the moon, and one day Mars — may snag most of the headlines, the company isn't just building rockets. For the past few years now, SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket has been deploying a massive constellation of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) communications satellites, called Starlink, that promise ubiquitous high-speed broadband anywhere in the world.

Starlink, alongside Microsoft's existing partnership with satellite operator SES, is what Azure Space is leveraging to bridge the gap, thus enabling customers to access workloads in Azure from the most remote destinations.

"What used to solely be the bastion of governments, the innovation developed by private space companies has democratized access to space and the use of space to create new scenarios and opportunities to meet the needs of both the public and private sector," said Keane, adding that Microsoft now plans to tap these resources to make space attainable to enterprises of any size.

"Our approach is to supply a multi-orbit, multi-band, multi-vendor, cloud-enabled capability to bring comprehensive satellite connectivity between our cloud data center regions and cloud edge devices," wrote Keane.

In addition to addressing connectivity to all ends of the earth, Microsoft isn't stopping there. Building on its experience with the Project Natick underwater datacenter, Microsoft is introducing the Azure Modular Data Center (MDC), a shipping container-sized cloud edge designed to be deployed in the most extreme environments.

"We believe it's important to bring Azure to where our customers are," said Bill Karagounis, GM of Azure Global's sovereign solutions division, in a launch video. "The MDC, think of it like a transportable self-contained data center."

The MDC can operate using traditional fiber or low-bandwidth networks, but can also be deployed in locations where there is no preexisting infrastructure using satellite uplinks from SES and StarLink.

This, according to Karagounis, makes the MDC ideal for a variety of use cases like humanitarian assistance, mobile command centers, or military missions. "The modular data center enables customers to augment their capability really, really quickly," he said.

Microsoft also announced Azure Orbital Emulator to augment its ground control-as-a-service offering, which was announced back in September.

Azure Orbital enables satellite operators to communicate and control their satellites and process data from within Microsoft Azure, eliminating the need to own and operate multiple ground stations around the world.

Azure Orbital Emulator takes things a step further by enabling operators to evaluate and train artificial intelligence algorithms and satellite networking before they are even launched.

"We intend to make Azure the platform and ecosystem of choice for the mission needs of the space community," said Keane.

The service is already in use by several customers in the Azure Government cloud.

Azure Space is taking off amid increased competition. In June, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled its own space business segment, launching its own ground control-as-a-service platform and announcing retired Air Force Major General Clint Crosier would head up the program.

Crosier previously served as the director of Space Force Planning.

AWS Ground Station operates much in the same way as Azure's competing service. It provides an alternative to owning and operating expensive infrastructure in order to support a satellite. The platform is already being used by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Beyond competition from rival Microsoft, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has invested heavily in developing rockets of his own under Blue Origin. However, it remains to be seen how Blue Origin will play into AWS ambitions for space.