Announcing general availability of Google Cloud CA Service
We are happy to announce the general availability of Certificate Authority Service offered by Google Cloud (Google Cloud CAS). Google Cloud CAS provides a highly scalable and available private CA to address the unprecedented growth in certificates in the digital world. This exponential growth is due to a perfect storm of conditions over the past few years, achieving almost a flywheel effect - the rise of cloud computing, moving to containers, the emergence of pervasive high speed connectivity, the proliferation of Internet-of-things (IoT) and smart devices (see our whitepaper on this topic).
See how easy it is to set up a CA with Google Cloud CAS:
- The first and most desired feature in Google Cloud CAS by our customers is scale and availability. Scale in this case is measured as a) number of issued certificates per second and b) total number of certificates/CAs allowed per project. Availability is the SLA backed up time for certificate issuance, per region.
When planning to build this product, we found that the most common problem from customers was around how to address machine and service identity within their cloud transformation. This was specifically problematic due to the more ephemeral nature of most cloud workloads relative to what customers do on premise with manual deployments (good examples are containers and microservices that are short lived). The scale required for certificate issuance creates huge demand and unpredictability to customers' existing CAs which they often cannot support. Last thing they want is their identity infrastructure to be their scalability bottleneck as they dynamically scale out to support special events: in retail space, this could be Black Friday sales where thousands of nodes/VMs are spun to accommodate spike in sales and then rapidly torn down post the spikes, rendering all investments made to just support Black Friday useless.
Another reason for renewed interest in scale was the move to a zero trust access model, which was expedited by COVID-19 and work from home requirements. The core need to open up device management across the internet created a new scale requirement for certificate enrollment to allow for securing the device over the internet. - In addition to scale and availability, the second Google Cloud CAS key benefit for our customers was savings compared to the cost of building an alternative solution. Such an endeavour requires purchasing Hardware Security Modules (HSM), licensing the software, purchasing server devices, securing multiple redundant root key material locations, then hiring a specialized PKI/DevOps team to operate the system at scale (high CapEX and OpEX).
Customers told us they only have so many projects they can take on, so they have to choose carefully. CAs and certificates are an enabler for their business and make a great candidate to free up resources that might have been used internally to solve the scale problem and reassign them to more business-critical tasks, while accelerating velocity of the projects that use the service. Google Cloud CAS is backed with hardware security (HSM) without any direct customer involvement with HSM purchasing, provisioning and management. We saw customers cancelling their HSM orders in response to cost savings provided by Google Cloud CAS. - Security was the third commonly quoted reason for considering Google Cloud CAS. Cloud CA that seamlessly integrates with other cloud services provides the most secure solution for their cloud workload, while freeing customers from having to keep software, hardware and firmware up to date.
- CA rotation (when CA certificate is close to expiry) is hard and normally requires a disruptive flow to replace the close to expiry CA with the new one. Customers asked us to make the process completely seamless for them. In response to those, we are adding a new feature to GA called CA pool that allows for a group of CAs serving the same incoming requests queue. CA rotation can simply be achieved by adding a new CA to the pool and taking the old one out of it, without any changes to workloads or client code. Also, the serving CA in the pool is chosen in a uniform fashion allowing for increased throughput.
- More control over the certificate issuance policy was another commonly asked feature. With GA, we are enhancing our policies to allow per user group policies to be defined. Also, admins can define certificate templates that get applied to all issued certificates overriding (some or all) the parameters in the issued certificate.
- We heard about configuration as code and the importance of Terraform support for configuring and managing Google Cloud CAS. We listened and created a Terraform provider for Google Cloud CAS.
- We also heard of the huge demand for making sure cert-manager works with Google Cloud CAS. cert-manager with more than 1.6 M downloads per day is one of the most commonly used open source tools for automating certificate lifecycle management within Kubernetes environments. In response to this ask, we worked with Jetstack and created integration with cert-manager.io.
- We heard from customers that they love their Hashicorp Vault as a policy engine and would like to continue using it for this new service. As such, we built a Hashicorp Vault plugin that allows it to be the source of policies and Google Cloud CAS being the certificate issuer.
- Customers also requested a guided way to set up the product, as such, we are announcing availability of CAS Qwiklab
- Pricing: Our pricing model offers a simple pay-as-you-go model. For large volume customers, we also provide subscription models to remove the ambiguity of billing when demand is non-predictable.
- SLA: Our SLA is now publicly available and offers 99.9% availability per region for certificate creation.
- More regions: We are happy to announce that CAS is available in many new regions, including São Paulo, Montréal, Frankfurt, London, Sydney, Mumbai, Tokyo, and many more.
- Compliance: CAS has been included as part of ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, SOC1, SOC2, SOC3, BSI C5, and PCI audits. We are also working to include CAS in our FedRAMP audits. Additionally CAS by default uses Google cloud HSM for private key protection which is FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated.
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