Earlier this week, EMC and VMware spinoff Pivotal threw down the gauntlet to Amazon with a new cloud development platform that includes a set of integrated tools for analyzing Big Data. Now, the infrastructure-as-a-service behemoth is firing back.

Amazon today announced two new AWS services at its re:Invent 2013 conference in Las Vegas, including WorkPlaces, a cloud-based virtual desktop solution that challenges VMware’s newly acquired Desktone offering for desktop-as-a-service dominance. Besides offering competitive pricing with plans starting at $35 per user per month, WorkPlaces provides persistent sessions that enable users to pick up from where they left off immediately after logging in. The Plus editions also come with Microsoft Office Professional and Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Services out of the box, in addition to a number of free utilities.

For developers, Amazon is rolling out AppStream, a tool that lets app makers improve user experience on smartphones and tablets by offloading graphics processing to the cloud. The service uses g2 EC2 instances to do the computational heavy lifting and the newly unveiled homegrown STX protocol to stream high-quality content.

If AppStream works as described, it will provide a shot in the arm for the mobile gaming scene and more notably, put the power of analytics literally at the fingertips of business users and data scientists. The service is currently in limited preview, but there’s no word yet on general availability.

Looking to steal some of the limelight surrounding re:Invent 2013, Google announced two free cloud services that aim to simplify mobile app development. The Mobile Backend Starter toolkit provides a general purpose backend for Android and iOS applications, while Cloud Endpoints offers access to libraries and APIs hosted on Google App Engine.