Run a vTPM in Confidential GKE Nodes workloads

Standard

This page shows you how to use the Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) in your Confidential Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Standard regional clusters' workloads. For more information about vTPMs, refer to Using Shielded GKE Nodes.

Overview

With vTPM in Confidential GKE Nodes workloads, you can create clusters and expose vTPMs to their workloads. vTPMs provide platform integrity along with other security features such as remote attestation, secret sealing, and random number generation.

Before you begin

Before you start, make sure you have performed the following tasks:

Enable the Google Kubernetes Engine API.

Enable Google Kubernetes Engine API

If you want to use the Google Cloud CLI for this task, install and then initialize the gcloud CLI. If you previously installed the gcloud CLI, get the latest version by running gcloud components update.
Note: For existing gcloud CLI installations, make sure to set the compute/region and compute/zone properties. By setting default locations, you can avoid errors in gcloud CLI like the following: One of [--zone, --region] must be supplied: Please specify location.

Requirements

vTPM in Confidential GKE Nodes workloads requires GKE version 1.26 and later.

Availability

You can use Confidential GKE Nodes under the following conditions:

In zones and regions with N2D instances or C2D instances available.
Node images using Container-Optimized OS with containerd (cos_containerd).

Create a Confidential GKE Nodes cluster

You can create a new cluster with Confidential GKE Nodes enabled by using the gcloud CLI or the Google Cloud console. If you enable Confidential GKE Nodes at cluster level, all the nodes in the cluster become Confidential VMs.

gcloud

When creating a new cluster, specify the --enable-confidential-nodes option in the following command:

gcloud container clusters create CLUSTER_NAME \
    --machine-type=MACHINE_TYPE \
    --enable-confidential-nodes

Replace the following:

CLUSTER_NAME: the name of your new cluster.
MACHINE_TYPE: the machine type for your cluster's default node pool, which must be either the N2D or C2D machine type.

Console

Go to the Google Kubernetes Engine page in the Google Cloud console.

Go to Google Kubernetes Engine
Click Create.
In the Standard section, click Configure.
In the navigation menu, under Cluster, click Security.
Select the Enable Confidential GKE Nodes checkbox.
For configuring other sections of the cluster, follow the instructions in Creating a regional cluster.
Click Create.

After creating a cluster with Confidential GKE Nodes, any node pools created in this cluster can only use confidential nodes. You can't create regular node pools in clusters with Confidential GKE Nodes enabled. You also can't disable Confidential GKE Nodes on individual node pools when you enable Confidential GKE Nodes at cluster level.

Run a vTPM in Confidential GKE Nodes workloads

To run vTPM in Confidential GKE Nodes workloads, Google provides a DaemonSet to apply to the Confidential GKE Nodes clusters. Run the following command to deploy the DaemonSet:

kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/cc-device-plugin/main/manifests/cc-device-plugin.yaml

Configure Pods to see the vTPM

You use a resource limit to configure Pods to see vTPM. Specify the resource limit as 1 in a Pod specification using the following key-value pair

Key: google.com/cc
Value: 1

An example of a Pod specification that uses vTPM:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: my-vtpm-pod
spec:
  containers:
  - name: nginx
    image: nginx
    ports:
    - containerPort: 8080
      name: http
    resources:
      limits:
        google.com/cc: 1

What's next

Learn more about Virtual Trusted Platform Module.