Security News > 2020 > September > Google Announces Confidential GKE Nodes, General Availability of Confidential VMs
Google on Tuesday announced an expansion of its Confidential Computing portfolio, with the general availability of Confidential VMs and the addition of Confidential GKE Nodes.
Introduced in July in beta, Confidential VMs were the first product in the Google Cloud Confidential Computing portfolio, and Google is making them available to all Google Cloud customers in the coming weeks.
Confidential GKE Nodes, the second product in Google's Confidential Computing portfolio, will arrive in beta when GKE 1.18 is released and should provide organizations with more options for confidential workloads when looking to use Kubernetes clusters with GKE. Built using the same technology foundation as Confidential VMs, Confidential GKE Nodes help organizations keep data encrypted in memory using a dedicated key that is node-specific.
Thus, the use of Confidential VMs is automatically enforced for all worker nodes on clusters that use Confidential GKE Nodes.
New capabilities that the Internet giant is introducing for Confidential VMs include audit reports for compliance, new policy controls for confidential computing resources, integration with other enforcement mechanisms, and the ability to share secrets securely with Confidential VMs. Organizations can now define specific access privileges for Confidential VMs, through the IAM Org Policy, and can disable non-confidential VMs within the project.