Amazon.com Inc.  launched a slew of new developer features and tools Thursday at it Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

During a two-hour keynote presentation, Werner Vogels (left), Amazon’s chief technology officer, announced new features for Lambda, a new service that offers protection against distributed denial of service attacks, automation of batch processing deployments and more. Here’s a look at the key announcements for developers, DevOps staff, chief information officers and big data enthusiasts:

For developers

Lambda@Edge

Amazon has launched a new AWS Lambda feature called Lambda@Edge, which makes it possible to run code at CloudFront locations, AWS’s content-delivery service. With Lambda@Edge, content can be customized close to the end user’s location thus minimizing network latency.

You can sign up for the preview on the Lambda@Edge site.

C# support for Lambda

When Lambda was launched it only offered support for Node.js, which was followed by Java support last year. At its re:Invent conference, AWS announced support for the highly requested C# programming language.  

AWS Step Functions

AWS Step Functions allows developers to coordinate the components of multiple, distributed applications using visual workflows. The visual editor makes it easy to build and run multi-step applications.

AWS Step Functions is available in the U.S. East (North Virginia), U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. West (Oregon), E.U. (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

Amazon Pinpoint

Amazon Pinpoint, a feature built into AWS, helps app makers run targeted push notification campaigns for their mobile app to drive user engagement. The mobile analytics service helps developers understand app usage trends, which users to target, the type of message to send and when to deliver it, as well as the ability to track the results of the targeted campaign.

The Pinpoint dashboards provide real-time analytics, an A/B testing tool and more.

AWS CodeBuild

Instead of spending time setting up, scaling, and patching build servers, the new AWS CodeBuild, a fully managed build service, will compile source code, runs tests, and produce software packages. CodeBuild scales continuously to accommodate build volumes and avoid pending builds stacking up.

A variety of source repositories are available including GitHub, AWS CodeCommit or an S3 bucket, as well as support for a variety of build environments like Android, Java, Python, Ruby, Go, Node.js or Docker.

With CodeBuild you are charged for build resources on a minute-by-minute basis, prices starting at $0.005 per minute, based on what you use.

For DevOps

AWS Batch

AWS Batch, available in preview, automates the deployment of batch processing jobs and enables developers, scientists and engineers to run batch processing jobs at scale on AWS.

Batch works with containers as opposed to the more traditional virtual machines. The Batch tool allows you to run apps and container images on whatever AWS EC2 instances are required. There is no additional charge for AWS Batch, but you will pay for the AWS resources, like EC2 instances, that you create.

AWS X-Ray

AWS X-Ray gives developers x-ray vision into their applications and helps them analyze and debug distributed applications. With an end-to-end view of requests, developers can use X-Ray to identify bottlenecks and analyze the performance of individual functions within their app, as well as identify areas that can be improved. AWS X-Ray can be used to analyze apps in development and production.  

Amazon also announced the AWS Personal Health Dashboard that will enable developers to monitor the performance and availability of the AWS services they use. The dashboard also provides automatic real-time alerts, which are triggered based on any changes to these services. The Personal Health Dashboard is available to all AWS customers.

For information technologists and CIOs

AWS Shield

A massive online attack at the end of October took down Twitter, Box, Reddit, Spotify and Etsy, among others, when Dynamic Network Services Inc. faced a DDoS attack.

AWS Shield is a managed protection service that will protect web applications on AWS from DDoS attacks. The Standard version of Shield will be available by default for all AWS customers at no additional cost and offers protection from the most common DDoS attacks. For protection against larger and more advanced attacks, customers can subscribe to AWS Shield Advanced.

For big data enthusiasts

AWS Glue

AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL (extract, transform, load) system that makes it easier to move data between multiple databases, apps and systems. The AWS Glue console will guide users through the process of moving data and makes it easier and faster to handle data discovery, conversion, mapping and job scheduling tasks.

AWS Glue is not yet available. Amazon has provided no release date, but have said it is “coming soon.”

Image via AWS