Vendors usually avoid introducing new products in the middle of the fiscal year when technology budgets are already committed to other solutions, but then Amazon Inc. is not known for following competitive conventions. The cloud-turned-retail giant pulled another surprise from its sleeve this morning in the form of two new services meant to help make its infrastructure platform, already the market leader by a wide margin, more appealing to mobile developers.

The first addition is Device Farm, a managed testing environment that can automatically check how an app behaves on different operating systems and platforms. What sets the service apart is the ability to do so across practically every popular phone and tablet at once with only a few clicks, which speed up the optimization process considerably.

Amazon touts Device Farm as a simpler alternative to conventional simulators that require setting up each experiment separately. But the main competition is from Appcelerator Test, the namesake and likewise cloud-based simulator of a long-time partner that offers a similar degree of automation for developers hoping to take some of the hassle out of fine-tuning their apps.

That willingness to cannibalize its ecosystem is mirrored in the other new addition that Amazon announced for its public cloud this morning: a service called API Gateway that provides the ability to control how apps, mobile or otherwise, interact with the rest of the world. Organizations can specify which third party can access what function and monitor the incoming as well as outgoing traffic from a centralized location.

But the area where that consolidated approach comes the most useful is rolling out updates, especially in large environments with upwards of dozens of services each with its own distinct interface that depend on one another to operate. That figure can easily jump to the hundreds or even thousands when adding the work apps that employees use to retrieve data from those backend processes while away from the office to the list.

Amazon sees a major opportunity in helping organizations solve that challenge as the number of connected devices on the corporate network continues to multiply, much like MuleSoft Inc., Apigee Inc. and the several other vendors that have already been offering cloud-based API management. None, however, can boast the same range of complementary services as Amazon Web Services, which Jeff Bezos’ firm hopes to exploit in order to make up for its late entry.