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Security Onboarding workforce identities to Google Cloud

In a company’s journey to the cloud, one of the topics that is important to sort out early is identity management. To do anything meaningful with Google Cloud, employees need to be able to sign in to the Cloud Console – but manually creating user accounts for each employee is rarely a good idea. Continue »

Windows How do I know when my VM is ready to connect

When you automatically provision VM instances, you might need to know when the initialization has completed so that you can connect to the VM or initiate the next deployment steps. There are a few ways to determine when a VM is ready, so let us explore what these are. Continue »

IAP Desktop Goodbye RDCMan, hello IAP Desktop

Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) is gone, it and took the Google Cloud IAP for Remote Desktop plugin with it. But now there is IAP Desktop to supersede both of them. Continue »

Windows Automatically joining a VM to Active Directory on Google Cloud

Cloud computing is all about being able to dynamically scale, provision, and decommission resources or entire environments on demand. But the idea that infrastructure is dynamic clashes with some assumptions Active Directory is built around, and creates a challenge if you run Windows workloads in the cloud. Continue »

Security Certificate enrollment: Crypto API, CNG, and other Windows APIs

One thing certreq and the Certificate Manager MMC snap-in have in common is that they rely heavily on Windows’ built-in APIs for managing certificates, encryption, and keys. This post takes a deeper look at which APIs Windows provides for cryptography, key management, certificate management, and certificate enrollment. Continue »

Security Certificate enrollment: Concepts

Many of the protocols we use every day rely on certificates. The process to request and obtain a new certificate from a CA is called certificate enrollment. This post explains the basic concepts behind certificate enrollment. Continue »

Security Authenticating users in tools or desktop apps

If your plan is to develop a tool or desktop app instead of a server-side application, the benefits of application default credentials are less obvious and reusing the user’s personal gcloud credentials instead might seem attractive. But there are some pitfalls. Continue »