Amazon AppStream Goes Into General Availability

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced general availability for Amazon AppStream, a service enabling developers to stream resource-intensive applications from the cloud that was first introduced at AWS re:Invent in November 2013.

Since Amazon (AMZN) executives first started talking about AppStream last year, the service has been available only to a select group of developers. But apparently the service is ready for prime time, and now it’s open to all Amazon developers, who have the option to build applications that run on AppStream and scale them to meet demand.

According to Amazon chief evangelist Jeff Barr, “You can now use AppStream to build complex applications that run from simple devices, unconstrained by the compute power, storage or graphical rendering capabilities of the device. Your application can take advantage of the new and powerful g2 instance type, including high-performance GPU-powered rendering of 2D and 3D graphics.”

One of the use cases for AppStream is gaming, an area cloud services providers—particularly those offering infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings—have become greatly interested in lately (at least, so the number of cloud gaming-related case studies coming our way seem to indicate).

AppStream gives Amazon developers a potentially great tool to cash in on growing markets related to resource-intensive apps. The applications run in a Windows 2008 R2 environment on Amazon EC2 instance and can make use of native Windows APIs and AWS resources including Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS and Amazon SES.

Meanwhile, the client code runs on an end user’s device.

Based on feedback since the November announcement, Amazon has added or enhanced a handful of features, including automated version resolution, Mac client support, client SDK improvements and a simplified “getting started” experience.