Amazon Web Services yesterday unveiled a range of new capabilities it’s adding to its cloud platform at its AWS Summit in New York City.

The biggest announcement is AWS’s new analytics service for real-time data streaming, Kinesis Analytics, which the company said is designed to make it easier to perform queries on real-time streaming data with SQL. The service is built atop of AWS’ Kinesis real-time streaming data platform, and will push the boundaries on the amount of data that can be ingested in real-time, AWS evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post.

“You can now run continuous SQL queries against your streaming data, filtering, transforming, and summarizing the data as it arrives,” he wrote. “You can focus on processing the data and extracting business value from it instead of wasting your time on infrastructure. You can build a powerful, end-to-end stream processing pipeline in 5 minutes without having to write anything more complex than a SQL query.”

Kinesis Analytics will be a big deal for data analysts and developers, said IDC analyst Al Hilwa in a statement to ComputerWorld.

“SQL is one of the biggest skill sets out there according to the surveys we do, and bringing it to Kinesis is likely to be well received,” the analyst said.

Kinesis is currently available in Amazon’s US East, US West and EU regions, with pricing related to the number of processing units required.

Besides Kinesis, AWS also touted a new Application Load Balancer (ALB) option in its Elastic Load Balancing tool, which has been up and running since 2009.

According to AWS Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels, the new ALB provides content-based routing, allowing developers more control over how data is distributed across servers. With the old Classic Load Balancer, content was distributed according to computing decisions made by the load balancer itself, rather than developers. The new ALB also supports container-based apps, Vogels said.

Also yesterday, AWS said that it’s lowering the price of snapshots for data volumes stores in its Elastic Block Store (EBS) service by up to 47 percent. Snapshots are typically used by developers to back up data stored in AWS’s S3 storage service.

In a security-related announcement, AWS also said it’s now possible for KMS users to bring their own encryption keys, which means they now have “local control over the generation and storage of keys.” This move should allow organizations to meet security and compliance requirements for even the most sensitive workloads, evangelist Barr said in his blog post.

Last but not least, AWS said its launching a new Snowball Job Management API, which allows users to build apps that can create and manage Snowball jobs, while the S3 Adapter allows users to access Snowball appliances as though they were an S3 endpoint.