Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By : Eyal Estrin
Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By: Eyal Estrin

Overview of this book

Securing resources in the cloud is challenging, given that each provider has different mechanisms and processes. Cloud Security Handbook helps you to understand how to embed security best practices in each of the infrastructure building blocks that exist in public clouds. This book will enable information security and cloud engineers to recognize the risks involved in public cloud and find out how to implement security controls as they design, build, and maintain environments in the cloud. You'll begin by learning about the shared responsibility model, cloud service models, and cloud deployment models, before getting to grips with the fundamentals of compute, storage, networking, identity management, encryption, and more. Next, you'll explore common threats and discover how to stay in compliance in cloud environments. As you make progress, you'll implement security in small-scale cloud environments through to production-ready large-scale environments, including hybrid clouds and multi-cloud environments. This book not only focuses on cloud services in general, but it also provides actual examples for using AWS, Azure, and GCP built-in services and capabilities. By the end of this cloud security book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of how to implement security in cloud environments effectively.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Securing Infrastructure Cloud Services
6
Section 2: Deep Dive into IAM, Auditing, and Encryption
10
Section 3: Threats and Compliance Management
14
Section 4: Advanced Use of Cloud Services

Securing containers

Following VMs, the next evolution in the compute era is containers.

Containers behave like VMs, but with a much smaller footprint.

Instead of having to deploy an application above an entire operating system, you could use containers to deploy your required application, with only the minimum required operating system libraries and binaries.

Containers have the following benefits over VMs:

  • Small footprint: Only required libraries and binaries are stored inside a container.
  • Portability: You can develop an application inside a container on your laptop and run it at a large scale in a production environment with hundreds or thousands of container instances.
  • Fast deployment and updates compared to VMs.

The following diagram presents the architectural differences between VMs and containers:

Figure 2.1 – VMs versus containers

If you are still in the development phase, you can install a container engine on your...