3^rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors enable enhanced security offerings for Google Cloud N2D and C2D VMs

AMD and Google have been a long partner in the data centre business and their joint effort to create Confidential Computing VMs is no secret at all. Now, Google Cloud is expanding this with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, there will be new VMs on the existing N2D and C2D VMs.

These VMs extend the AMD EPYC processor portfolio of Confidential Computing on Google Cloud with the performance of 3^rd Gen EPYC processors in compute-optimized VMs.

A key Confidential Computing component provided by AMD EPYC processors is AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), part of AMD Infinity Guard. This advanced hardware-based security feature encrypts full system memory and individual virtual machine memory as well as isolates the VM memory from the hypervisor, without dramatically impacting performance. With the expansion of Confidential Computing in N2D and C2D VMs, Google Cloud customers now have access to advanced hardware-enabled security features powered by 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC processors that will help protect sensitive, wide-variety workloads.

“AMD has worked collaboratively with Google Cloud and Google’s security experts to provide customers access to advanced security technology while still achieving high performance in their workloads,” said Lynn Comp, corporate vice president, Cloud Business Unit, AMD. “With 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC processors powering the new confidential computing offerings from Google Cloud, customers can continue to enjoy the general purpose and compute optimized workload capabilities they’ve had from Google Cloud, all while feeling confident in the security of their data.”

“By providing our customers with advanced security technology from 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, we’re not only delivering more performance, but also optimizing Confidential Computing for more types of workloads,” said Nelly Porter, Group Product Manager, Google Cloud. “At Google Cloud, we believe that continuously investing in emerging technologies like Confidential Computing with partners like AMD will help us address our customers’ most pressing privacy concerns.”

Confidential N2D and C2D VMs with 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC processors:

· Enable AMD SEV, which keeps VM memory encrypted with a dedicated per-VM instance key that is generated and managed by the AMD Security Processor.
The ability to run workloads without dramatically impacting performance compared to standard VMs, all while enabling robust protection capabilities against attacks originating in other VMs, on the same physical host, as well as from the hypervisor itself.
One-click implementation of Confidential Computing on 3^rd Gen EPYC CPU powered N2D and C2D VMs with no code changes
Simple upgrading to Confidential N2D VMs with the latest hardware by simply selecting “AMD Milan or later” as the CPU platform.

Confidential N2D and C2D VMs powered by 3^rdGen AMD EPYC processors are available in regions across the globe, including us-central1 (Iowa), asia-southeast1 (Singapore), us-east1 (South Carolina), us-east4 (North Virginia), asia-east1 (Taiwan), europe-west4 (Netherlands) and more. Confidential VMs are available anywhere N2D and C2D machines are available.

via AMD Press Release