VMware and Google are mixing-and-matching cloud capabilities in what looks like a case of teaming up against Amazon Web Services.

They'd be teaming up against Microsoft Azure, too, of course. Don't want to leave those guys out. But obviously, AWS is the big fish in cloud services, and vendors such as VMware might need some help competing against it.

VMware's vCloud Air is a hybrid cloud platform, one that gives customers a hosted public cloud that runs a VMware environment. Part of the pitch is that vCloud Air can provide a more controlled public-cloud option than AWS; it's similar to the cloud offerings that Cisco, HP, IBM, Oracle, and others are providing.

It's obviously a competitive market, one where prices plummeted last year. But Amazon and Google increasingly show signs of wanting to compete on features rather than raw price. VMware did its part to fight the feature battle last week by announcing some new vCloud Air features, including VMware's NSX network virtualization.

Now, VMware is adding four Google cloud services as well: Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery (big data analytics), Google Cloud Datastore (a NoSQL database), and Google Cloud DNS (part of the Google Cloud Networking suite).

They'll be made available later this year to all vCloud customers and might get added to VMware's vRealize management software too. (The release says the companies are "exploring" this.) Billing will be handled through the pay-as-you-go feature that was one of last week's vCloud Air additions.