Amazon Web Services (AWS) is becoming more and more formidable enemy for competitors. During the Amazon AWS re:Invent 2013 conference, which is being held at this time in Las Vegas, Amazon reveals many new features on cloud services.

The second edition of the conference, in the wake of the success of the first in November 2012, provides an agenda full of practical sessions whose topics are focused mostly on the software and data-processing. AWS now increasingly turning its attention to the segment of the PaaS services, in which it comes to application development and deployment of database, analytics, virtual desktop, and other services. Other Amazon partners are also connecting with AWS service to enhance the development of solutions for the Web, mobile, gaming, Big Data and corporate IT infrastructure.

Another highlight on the Re: invent was the announcement to expand the AWS marketplace. Meanwhile, AWS marketplace has more than 1,100 pre-configured software solutions in the areas of software infrastructure, development tools and business software. In Las Vegas, many partner companies introduced new AWS services and offerings, including Splunk, Citrix, Intel, SAP, VMware, F5 Networks and NetApp.

Splunk and AWS increase operational intelligence

Splunk announces the availability of the new Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Splunk Enterprise 6 and Hunk. Under the name “Splunk Analytics for Hadoop,” they enable faster deployment of Splunk software and thus provides crucial insights into cloud-based applications and data.

The new version of the Splunk App for AWS, AWS CloudTrail, is an innovative service that logs all AWS API calls such monitoring, security and compliance running on the AWS platform applications and infrastructure.

“Splunk Cloud, Splunk Storm and the new AMIs demonstrate our continued commitment to cloud computing and our innovative work with AWS,” said Leena Joshi, senior director of solutions marketing, Splunk. “Organizations are rapidly moving their applications to the cloud, and AWS is the leader in cloud computing. The release of AMIs for Splunk Enterprise and Hunk makes it easy for customers to use Splunk products in AWS so machine data is accessible, usable and valuable to everyone across the organization. The new version of the Splunk App for AWS will help organizations increase visibility into their cloud deployments by combining AWS access, usage and billing data to provide security intelligence along with operational and business insights.”

CloudTrail is the platform for developers to feed for all of their resources on AWS including AWS APIs from their own applications and third-party software. This mean that developers can now make changes like security group changes, when to terminate an EC2 instance and what action they can take based on this. The new API logs calls from Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Store (EBS), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Relational Database Service (RDS), Identity and Access Management (IAM), Security Token Service (STS), Redshift and CloudTrail itself.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is now available as a managed service on AWS offering up to 3 terabytes of storage, 30,000 IOPS and high availability support. Amazon customer can deploy a PostgreSQL database in minutes with database parameters automatically configured for maximum performance in just a few clicks via the AWS Management Console.

Many developers have expressed a desire to be able to move their applications on Amazon RDS, or to create new ones using that platform, without having to give up PostgreSQL and its related features to the full-text indexing, data compression and its adherence to the ACID principles (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) properties for the transactions.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL offers support for the Virtual Private Cloud Amazon Web Services, which allows you to perform database instances within isolated sections through a virtual network defined by the user, from the point of view of performance. Amazon provides support to use a PostgreSQL database with five gigabytes of storage and analyze up to three terabytes without any downtime. Amazon RDS so now supports the deployment and administration of 4 engines database – PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

Amazon Kinesis – answer to big data

Amazon Kinesis is a full real-time processing of large data streaming service announced by Amazon during the event. This new service allows customers to store and process hundreds of terabytes of data per hour from hundreds of thousands of sources, facilitating the development of applications dealing with real-time data such as financial transactions and marketing, distribution via social networks, the number and connection time, the metric and the location.

Applications equipped with Amazon Kinesis may launch a dashboard in real-time alerts, guide business decisions in real time such as changes in prices and advertising strategies, or transferring data to other services big data such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR) or Amazon Redshift.

Amazon WorkSpaces – Desktops as a service

AWS has been courting enterprise IT users and head start a competition into virtual Desktops as a service. So far, AWS had focused on providing the infrastructure for cloud applications. Now it is expanding its services to offer to the ultimate user.

The new service called Amazon WorkSpaces allows users to make a Windows 7 desktop on any devices. Compared to decentralized, physical desktops, the advantage of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is mainly due to centralized management. The area is ideal for mobile users who need a full-fledged desktop and secure jobs that can be centrally managed. What’s more, because everything is cloud-based and persistent, the same data and same experience is carried forward wherever user log in.

“Amazon really can have a significant impact on this and they’re a real player in this space now…” said Stu Miniman about Amazon Workspaces on TheCube.

John Furrier added that the real space that people expect VDI to grab attention is not on desktops but on mobile platforms and Dave Vellante said,  “Remember when, Compaq dominated the PC business, and Dell came late to the game, but they came with a better model. Dell became a dominant player and disrupted, I feel like the timing is right for Amazon, they’re architecting around mobile… I feel like a lot of people will glom onto this.”