When it comes to securing cloud resources, one of the most important tools for administrators is the ability to set guardrails for resource configurations that can be applied consistently across the environment, centrally managed, and safely rolled out. Google Cloud's custom Organization Policy is a powerful tool that can …

At Google Cloud, we work to continually improve our platform’s security capabilities to deliver the most trusted cloud. As part of this goal, we’re helping our users move away from less secure authentication methods such as long-lived, unauditable, service account keys towards more secure alternatives when authenticating …

To help customers implement defense in depth strategies, Google Cloud offers multiple layers of centralized resource governance controls that can help organizations securely scale their Google Cloud adoption across thousands of projects, APIs, and developers. These controls can help administrators strengthen security and support compliance across their entire org …

Compliance efforts can feel like a challenging endeavor in most organizations. Engineering teams routinely don’t understand how often-confusing requirements will actually make the organization more secure. Sometimes, even the words that define compliance requirements can be hard to comprehend. The entire exercise can feel overwhelming, like being on …

The security of the software supply chain is a complex undertaking for modern enterprises. Securing the software supply chain, particularly build artifacts like container images, is a crucial step in enhancing overall security. To provide built-in, centralized visibility into your applications, we are introducing software supply chain security insights …

When developers are innovating quickly, security can be an afterthought. That’s even true for AI/ML workloads, where the stakes are high for organizations trying to protect valuable models and data. When you deploy an AI workload on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), you can benefit from the many …

Creating and managing the security of Kubernetes clusters is a lot like building or renovating a house. Both require making concessions across many areas when trying to find a balance between security, usability and maintainability. For homeowners, these choices include utility and aesthetic options, such as installing floors, fixtures …

Monitoring microservices in the cloud has become an increasingly cumbersome exercise for teams struggling to keep pace with developers’ rapid application release velocity. One way to make things easier for overloaded security teams is to use the open-source runtime security platform Falco to quickly identify suspicious behavior in Linux …

Today, we are thrilled to announce that GKE Enterprise, the premium edition of GKE, will be generally available on November 15, 2023. With GKE Enterprise, companies can increase development and deployment velocity across multiple teams, easily and securely run their most important business-critical workloads, and reduce total cost of …

Detecting vulnerabilities in open-source software requires a holistic approach, and security best practices recommend scanning early and often throughout your development lifecycle to help maintain an effective security posture. However, only scanning in the CI/CD pipeline or registry can miss artifacts and containers that are deployed to production …

Security Command Center Premium, Google Cloud’s built-in security and risk management solution, provides out-of-the-box security controls for cloud posture management and threat detection. As our customers build more complex environments with different risk profiles, cloud security teams may need to monitor for specific conditions and threats not covered …

Customers using Kubernetes at scale need consistent guardrails for how resources are used across their environments to improve security, resource management, and flexibility. Customers have told us that they need an easy way to apply and view those policy guardrails, so we launched the Policy Controller dashboard and added …

We are excited to announce that the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Security Posture dashboard is now generally available. The interface is designed to streamline the security management of your GKE clusters, and now includes a range of powerful features such as misconfiguration detection and vulnerability scanning to help ensure …

Editor's note: This blog post has been adapted from the April 2023 Threat Horizons Report. Cloud customers are increasingly running their compute workloads in Kubernetes clusters due to the availability, flexibility, and security they provide. Just like other IT assets, these clusters need to be routinely patched to keep …

Google Cloud offers a clever way of allowing Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) workloads to safely and securely authenticate to Google APIs with minimal credentials exposure. I will illustrate this method using a tool called kaniko. What is kaniko? kaniko is an open source tool that allows you to build …

As more organizations adopt Kubernetes, they also embrace new paradigms for connecting and protecting their workloads. Relying on perimeter defense alone is no longer an effective strategy. With microservice architecture patterns continuing to evolve rapidly, it is imperative that organizations adopt a defense-in-depth strategy to keep their applications and …

Flexible application architectures, CI/CD pipelines, and container workloads often run untrusted code and hence should be isolated from sensitive infrastructure. One common solution has been to deploy defense-in-depth products (like GKE Sandbox which uses gVisor ) to isolate workloads with an extra layer of protection. Google Cloud’s serverless …

At Google Cloud, we’re driven by a vision of invisible security, where advanced security capabilities are engineered into our platforms, operations are simplified, and stronger security outcomes can be achieved. As we pursue this ideal, we want to help make security easier to use and manage. Our new …

Compliance officers and platform engineering teams often find it challenging to ensure security, manage consistency, and oversee governance across multiple products, environments, and teams. Google Cloud's Organization Policy Service can help tackle this challenge with a policy-based approach that simplifies policy administration across Google Cloud resources and projects. We …

Integrating your ArgoCD deployment with Connect Gateway and Workload Identity provides a seamless path to deploy to Kubernetes on many platforms. ArgoCD can easily be configured to centrally manage various cluster platforms including GKE clusters, Anthos clusters, and many more. This promotes consistency across your fleet, saves time in …

When you deploy an application on Kubernetes, it runs as a service account — a system user understood by the Kubernetes control plane. The service account is the basic tool for configuring what an application is allowed to do, analogous to the concept of an operating system user on a …

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Confidential GKE Nodes. Many organizations have made Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) the foundation of their modern application architectures. While the benefits of containers and Kubernetes can outweigh that of traditional architectures, moving to and running those apps in the …

We recently received helpful information through the Vulnerability Rewards Program for Authorized Networks and Cloud Run/Functions on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Based on that information, we updated our product documentation and prioritized a plan to make engineering changes to GKE to restrict access to only GKE-related services. Those …

At the core of a zero trust approach to security is the idea that trust needs to be established via multiple mechanisms and continuously verified. Internally, Google has applied this thinking to the end-to-end process of running production systems and protecting workloads on cloud-native infrastructure, an approach we call …