Summary

This chapter highlights the need for hardening images for both VMs and containers. It outlines the steps for managing images, securing and hardening them, and building image management pipelines. In addition, we discussed the use of cloud-native tools on Google Cloud to build security scanning of the CI/CD pipeline. To further secure applications running in the cloud environment, we explored Google Compute Engine security capabilities such as Shielded VMs, vTPMs, and Confidential Computing. Finally, we discussed various measures for securing containers and applications running inside them, such as network policies to control traffic flow and key management systems for encryption key security and management.

In the next chapter, we will cover Security Command Center, which is used to monitor the security posture of your Google Cloud organization.