Amazon has made AppStream available to all customers. The service lets you stream resource intensive apps including 3D games and interactive HD applications from the cloud.

Amazon AppStream deploys and renders apps on the AWS infrastructure and streams the output to mass-market devices such as PCs and mobile phones. As the developer, you can choose to stream either all or parts of your app from the cloud. There’s an SDK that currently supports streaming applications from Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 to devices running FireOS, Android, iOS, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. Amazon AppStream is initially available in the US-East-1 (N.Virginia) region, with support for more regions “coming soon”.

Writing on the Amazon Web Services Blog, chief evangelist Jeff Barr said:

“I am happy to announce that Amazon AppStream is now being made available to all interested developers.”

He said apps can take advantage of the new and powerful g2 instance type, including high-performance GPU-powered rendering of 2D and 3D graphics.

Apps run in a Windows 2008 R2 environment on an EC2 instance, and can make use of native Windows APIs and AWS resources such as relational (Amazon RDS) and NoSQL (Amazon DynamoDB) databases, persistent object storage (Amazon S3), caching (Amazon ElastiCache), message queues (Amazon SQS), publish and subscribe messaging (Amazon SNS), and email delivery (Amazon SES). Barr says that since these services run in the same Region as the EC2 instance, latency will be low and performance should be very good.

The client code calls AppStream to obtain an Entitlement URL through an Entitlement Service. Amazon supplies a sample that you can use as-is, customize, or use as the basis for your own implementation. The client opens the Entitlement URL to initiate the streaming of video and audio content for playback.

If you need an introduction to AppStream see our previous article Amazon AppStream - Let The Cloud Do The Heavy Lifting or watch this video which outlines the concept:

Some features have been added to AppStream between its original launch last year and today’s wider launch, starting with the fact that AppStream now detects the SDK version that was used to create a client and launches compatible backend services automatically. Mac Client support has been added with an OSX SDK, and the client SDKs have been improved and now include support for game controllers.