Hardening hypervisors
The Nova service, one of OpenStack's most complex projects, provides compute functionality in the environment. Nova is very pervasive throughout an OpenStack cloud and interacts with most of the other core IaaS services. Proper configuration of this particular service is an important factor in securing an OpenStack deployment.
Standard Linux hardening practices and hypervisors
The key to security in an OpenStack environment is the configuration and hardening of the virtualization technology, also named the hypervisor. Although OpenStack can be configured to use many different hypervisors, by far the most common hypervisor in use is KVM. All of the top operating systems, such as RHEL, Ubuntu, and CentOS, support the KVM hypervisor.
All of the top OpenStack distributions, such as Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Cisco, and SUSE, use KVM as the default hypervisor; other solutions like the one from Canonical have the ability to use LXC/LXD and KVM. Therefore, as KVM is a common...
