The product floodgates have officially opened at today’s AWS Summit in San Francisco. Amazon kicked things off with the launch of a new peering option for its free Virtual Public Cloud capability, which allows users to carve out a chunk of the shared EC2 environment into a private network that provides increased control and security.

With peering, customers can now link multiple VPCs in an Availability Zone so that the instances they contain are able to freely communicate with each other using their private IP addresses, just as if they were on the same network. That elevates management complexity and takes some of the hassle out of cross-team collaboration in enterprises where each department has its own public cloud deployment. To enable this and similar use cases, Amazon has made it possible to peer VPCs belonging to different accounts with a maximum of up to 50 one-to-one connections per network, which should suffice for even the largest organizations.

The new feature was unveiled in conjunction with the news that all four of Amazon’s U.S. Infrastructure Regions, including its dedicated government cloud, have received a Department of Defense (DoD) Provisional Authorization to run agency workloads with low- and moderate-risk impact levels. Additionally, the firm announced the general availability of WorkSpaces, the desktop virtualization service it introduced at re:Invent last November.

Amazon’s partners are also showing off their new wares at today’s event. In the cloud analytics category, SnapLogic unveiled new feature for its flagship API management platform that rapidly loads and synchronizes information from on-premise sources such as Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL directly into the Amazon’s Redshift data warehouse. A couple hours after the tool made its debut, a company called Numenta pulled the curtains back on a data-driven monitoring solution for AWS designed to give admins a real-time view of their environments wherever they may be. Dubbed Grok, the offering is available in two editions with 13 and 200 metrics respectively and has a companion Android app that displays output in an easily consumable visual format.

Over on the security front, Alert Logic is rolling out updated versions of its managed threat detection and intrusion prevention solutions. The new release of Threat Manager sports a new unified management console designed with hybrid cloud environments in mind, while Web Security Manager has been made available for direct purchase on the AWS Marketplace. It’s joined two other fresh additions to the store: Fortigate’s namesake network protection platform and the widely-praised Spam Firewall from Barracuda.

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Stay tuned for more updates as AWS Summit unfolds, and be sure to watch our live coverage at SiliconANGLE.tv.