Amazon Web Services rolled out a series of important, but admittedly not groundbreaking, services yesterday during day two of its AWS Re:Invent conference. The services were introduced by Andrew Jassy, senior vice president of Web Services at Amazon.com, during his keynote yesterday.

AWS’ new products continue a regular trend that has seen the company roll out no less than 235 new services and updates, as part of its ongoing campaign to convince enterprises to ditch traditional IT hardware for the cloud, reset vendor pricing and make the whole cloud-based infrastructure thing that much more compelling.

CloudTrail

As any enterprise using AWS knows, apps are becoming increasingly integrated and complex, leading to more calls to AWS’ API. This can get confusing – but keeping rack of all that information can be useful for security analytics, operational troubleshooting, compliance and resource lifecycle tracking. Now, to help IT experts and developers keep track of all that data, its just rolled out AWS CloudTrail, a new service that records API calls and publishes the log files to a storage bucket in AWS’ cloud storage offering, AWS S3.

Using CloudTrail, developers will be able to keep track of the actions made by users over designated periods of time, and see which users have accessed which resources. The source IP address of that activity is also viewable, aiding developers further. AWS said that CloudTrail won’t come with any special charge, just regular SNS (Simple Notification Service) and S3 prices. To illustrate how helpful CloudTrail can be, AWS presented the following fun flow chart that shows how it fits into the greater ecosystem:

AppStream

Aside from helping developers, one of AWS’s biggest ambitions is to see games, apps and even desktops run entirely from the cloud, and its unveiled two new products to help facilitate that. First up is AppStream, which allows applications to be run directly in Amazon’s cloud, then run on a variety of popular platforms. Theoretically, anyone using the app wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an app running on AppStream or their hardware, although the speed at which the device receives the stream might impact that.

“Developers have told us that it is frustrating to build and deliver high-end applications for mass-market devices given their hardware constraints. They want to provide spectacular graphics, and responsive, fluid experiences to the largest possible audience regardless of the device a person chooses to use,” said Mike Frazzini, General Manager of Amazon Games.

“Amazon AppStream frees developers from these limitations by allowing them to stream their applications to low-end devices as if these consumers were using high-end devices.”

AppStream isn’t completely polished just yet – for now, it only works with Android, iOS and Windows, as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fires. However, AWS is promising to add support for Macs next year, though it hasn’t yet said what other platforms – if any – it’ll run on, nor if it will be able to work inside a browser. Serious gamers might also turn their noses up at AppStream, as it can only stream games at a max of 720p at 30FPS.

WorkSpaces

Last but not least is WorkSpaces, a Desktop-as-a-Service solution that allows virtualized desktops to be run and managed from Amazon’s cloud. To be sure, business-oriented services like this are kind of old hat, but AWS says that its solution has the advantage of being far more cost-effective – less than half the price of what it would cost enterprises to operate their own virtualization servers, says Amazon.

“Our enterprise customers have been asking for us to deliver a virtual desktop solution that is simple to manage, scales up and down as needed and doesn’t require large capital investment or heavy operational support. Until now that solution has not existed,” said Robert Groat, Chief Technology Officer, Smartronix.

“We’re very excited to see a solution for virtual desktops done the ‘Amazon Web Services way.’ Beyond the productivity benefits, we believe enterprises will save over 40 percent of the life cycle cost for desktop services while also gaining additional benefits such as built-in security, telecommuting flexibility, high availability and simplified operations management.”

WorkSpaces doesn’t allow computers to run entirely from Amazon’s cloud – to view the remote desktop, users will still need to open up an application first, though the big advantage is that the service is available on mobile devices as well. One question that hasn’t been answered is whether or not Amazon has been able to resolve performance issues, something that’s prevented virtualization of desktops and apps from gaining popularity to date.

Even so, WorkSpaces looks to have at least one rival worried. Speaking to SiliconANGLE, Erik Frieberg, vice president of product marketing, end-user computing at Vmware, which offers its own DaaS solution, provided this rather bullish statement:

“VMware welcomes new entrants to the market as it further validates DaaS as being an important strategy to help modernize traditional desktops. Desktone by VMware is the pioneer of the industry and offers enterprise class virtual desktops through the cloud which customers have told us they prefer over Windows Server desktops. With the largest service provider network among DaaS providers, we have been the go-to vendor for over six years.”

The introduction of the WorkSpaces virtual desktop services should send a chill through the competitive vendor ranks. WorkSpaces still has to be proven outside of its limited beta program, but AWS in its growth strategy is starting to look beyond the traditional data center confines.

One thing going for it is that AWS does have one of the most robust cloud infrastructures around, and it admits that previous solutions have been half-baked, so at the very least WorkSpaces should be a solid rival too anything we’ve seen so far.

“Over the past couple years, the new service customers have requested most frequently is a virtual cloud desktop service,” said Gene Farrell, General Manager of Amazon WorkSpaces.

“They’ve been frustrated by the available options – traditional desktops that are hard to manage and keep secure, or virtual desktops that are expensive and deliver inconsistent performance. Amazon WorkSpaces aims to address these issues by offering secure, easy-to-manage, high-performance desktops in the cloud at a fraction of the price of traditional VDI.”