Amazon Web Services Inc. Thursday announced the general availability of several new services that it announced during its annual re:Invent conference last November.

Two of the new services are focused on the “internet of things,” which is an area that AWS said it’s looking to expand into in order to satisfy its customer’s demands to be able to move edge data into the cloud and perform analytics.

AWS IoT Things Graph is described as a fully managed service that helps people build IoT applications without doing any coding. The service works allows customers to connect various devices and cloud services via a simple interface, Amazon said.

The idea is to help users “build IoT applications visually,” said AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post announcing the service. The problem it’s trying to address is a lack of standards with IoT devices, which forces developers to write new code to connect each one with the cloud-based IoT services they use. But that’s a painstaking process that developers would prefer to avoid, the company said.

“AWS IoT Things Graph provides a visual drag-and-drop interface for connecting and coordinating interactions between devices and web services, so you can build IoT applications quickly,” the company said in its description of the service. “For example, in a commercial agriculture application, you can define interactions between humidity, temperature, and sprinkler sensors with weather data services in the cloud to automate watering.”

AWS IoT Things Graph is available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions, with pricing based on the number of steps executed or the number of deployments.

IoT Events is another fully managed service that’s designed to make it easier for users to detect and respond to changes indicated by IoT sensors and applications. For example, it could be used to warn of malfunctioning machinery or a slowdown in production input, Barr said in a second blog post.

The service also allows users to build “detector models” when such changes arise, so automated actions can be triggered. Those actions might include sending a message to a service technician so they can go and fix the problem, or invoking an AWS Lambda function, Barr said.

AWS IoT Events is currently available in the US East regions in Northern Virginia and Ohio as well as US West and Europe regions.

The company also announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka on Thursday. Amazon MSK, as it’s called, is a fully managed service that enables developers to build and run highly available, secure and scalable applications based on Apache Kafka, without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.

Apache Kafka is a scalable, fault-tolerant, publish-subscribe messaging system that’s used to power distributed applications. More specifically, the service captures and analyzes data streams in real-time, allowing users to generate better insights about the state of their apps while they’re running. Numerous big-name tech firms rely on Kafka, including the likes of LinkedIn Corp., which built it, plus Twitter Inc. and Airbnb Inc.

The technology is certainly useful, but Amazon said many of its customers were complaining about the time and expense that goes into securing, scaling, patching and ensuring high availability for their Apache Kafka clusters. With Amazon MSK, customers no longer need to worry about those tasks and can instead just focus on building and updating their applications.

“While Kafka is a popular enterprise data streaming and messaging framework, it can be difficult to setup, scale, and manage in production,” Amazon evangelist Danilo Poccia wrote in a blog post. “Amazon MSK takes care of these managing tasks and makes it easy to set up, configure, and run.”

Poccia said Amazon MSK is priced “per broker-hour and per provisioned storage-hour,” and is currently available in its two US East regions as well as US West, Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (Paris), and EU (London) regions.

Finally, there was an interesting development on the security side with the news Thursday McAfee LLC has launched a new security offering for Amazon’s Relational Database Service. McAfee Database Security for Amazon RDS, as it’s called, is comprised of a database activity monitoring tool that provides instant alerts to any malicious behavior detected on servers; a virtual patching tool that detects and applies any missing software patches; and a vulnerability manager that makes it easier to identify security gaps and conduct audits.

Photo: Tony Webster/Flickr