Returning attendees of re:Invent this week may have expected to be greeted with the same turret of new services Amazon.com Inc. unleashed at last year’s conference, but the retail giant has prepared a different surprise for the latest installation of its annual cloud show. The barrage of product announcements is once again upon us, but this time it’s partners who are manning the cannons.

The conference is kicking off to a healthy mix of business- and developer-oriented updates, as well as a few that fall somewhere between. Taking the cake in that category is the launch of GitHub Enterprise on Amazon Web Services (AWS), part of a broader upgrade to the commercial version of the hugely popular free code sharing portal that introduces even bigger enhancements under the hood.

The newest version of the platform, which has so far only been available for deployment on-premise, can support more activity using less resources than the previous release and packs a high-availability option that allows users to create redundant copies of instances. The release also packs a streamlined interface with new project management capabilities and productivity features as well as expanded security functionality, including a more granular audit log that can display the location from which a particular action originates and trace it back to individual team members.

GitHub isn’t the only vendor the deepened the moat around its offering for re:Invent 2014. Fellow open-core vendor Alfresco Software Inc., which similarly offers a free version of its solution for free and a commercial edition to enterprises with more advanced needs, has also made security a top priority with the latest version of its enterprise content and business process management platform.

Alfresco One Enterprise 5.0 has been adapted to meet the strict requirements for deploying software on the AWS GovCloud region and comes with an optimal at-rest encryption module that can scramble data before its beamed up to the cloud giant’s S3 object storage service. Customers are also given full control over the decryption keys.

And continuing the security theme, Evident.io Inc. took to re:Invent to reveal that it has netted $9.85 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures and True Ventures to make it safer for organizations to deploy workloads on AWS. The company has developed a platform that provides a centralized environment for identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities across multiple accounts on the retail giant’s cloud platform, a value proposition that the new financing will help expand.