Deploying Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated clusters on Shielded Virtual Machines

We are pleased to announce the provisioning of Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated clusters on Google Cloud Shielded VMs is now generally available. This blog gives a short overview of Shielded VMs and the new configuration parameter introduced in the OpenShift Dedicated provisioning workflow.

Shielded VMs are specialized VMs on Google Cloud with extra security features such as secure boot, firmware and integrity monitoring and rootkit protection. This protects enterprise workloads from threats like remote attacks, privilege escalation, and malicious insiders.

Red Hat customers can optionally select Enable Secure Boot for Shielded VMs to use Shielded VMs when installing OpenShift Dedicated clusters via the OpenShift Cluster Manager Hybrid Cloud Console. This feature is available in OpenShift Dedicated version 4.13.0 or higher.

Since Secure Boot support for Shielded VMs is an install time setting, existing OpenShift Dedicated clusters deployed on Google Cloud cannot be edited to support Shielded VMs. One must create new clusters to enable use of Shielded VMs.

For more details, refer to the prerequisites and steps to create an OpenShift Dedicated cluster on Google Cloud Platform.

Shielded VM setting in the OpenShift Dedicated cluster creation wizard

With support for this feature, OpenShift Dedicated users can set constraints/compute.requireShieldedVm Google Cloud organization policy constraint to True to be sure all Google Cloud Compute Engine VM instances created within the Google Cloud organization are Shielded VMs. 

There is no additional cost for provisioning OpenShift Dedicated clusters on Google Cloud with Shielded VM support. Also, use of Shielded VM does not incur additional infrastructure costs on top of the Google Cloud Compute Engine pricing. For more details, refer Google Cloud Shielded VM pricing.

Try OpenShift Dedicated from the Google Cloud Marketplace

OpenShift Dedicated purchased from the Google Cloud Marketplace is an easy and self-service way to try OpenShift Dedicated with a flexible pay-as-you-go consumption model. You can also retire a portion of your Google Cloud committed spend when purchasing OpenShift Dedicated.

Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated is a fully managed application platform that helps you more quickly build, deploy, and scale applications, rather than having to deal with the underlying infrastructure. Get started with OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud today.

Additional resources on this topic

• Shielded VMs in Google Cloud
• OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Marketplace listing
• Steps to Create a cluster on Google Cloud Platform in OpenShift Dedicated documentation
• Cloud deployment options in OpenShift Dedicated documentation
• Google Cloud organization policy constraints