After diving into the desktop-as-a-service market and tackling mobile UX on Day 2 of re:Invent 2013, Amazon is going after cloud analytics in a two-pronged offensive against enterprise vendors.

On the relational database front, the firm is upgrading its RDS service to support PosgreSQL, an open source MySQL rival with roots stretching back to the early ‘80s. Using the AWS Management Console, customers can deploy the software in minutes, configure an isolated virtual network with custom firewall policies, and copy snapshots of their instances to different Availability Zones for increased uptime.

By eliminating the bulk of the administrative work associated with setting up a PostgreSQL database, and greatly reducing overhead in the process, RDS for PostgreSQL extends Amazon’s cloud dominance to yet another platform. The company hopes that the convenience and cost efficiency of AWS will be enough to replicate its success in one of the fastest growing segments of the Big Data ecosystem: real time analytics.

Amazon is throwing its hat into the ring with Kinesis, a newly announced stream processing engine that can ingest thousands of data sources generating multiple terabytes of data per hour for a fraction of the cost of on-premise alternatives. The unified information stream that comes out the other end can be fed into any number of third party analytics tools, hooked up to an application, or shipped off to an AWS data store.

“Database and MapReduce technologies are good at handling large volumes of data,” commented Terry Hanold, the vice president of New Business Initiatives at AWS. “But they are fundamentally batch-based, and struggle with enabling real-time decisions on a never-ending—and never fully complete—stream of data. Amazon Kinesis aims to fill this gap, removing many of the cost, effort and expertise barriers customers encounter with streaming data solutions, while providing the performance, durability, and scale required for the largest, most advanced implementations.”