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\noindent Today, more and more people rely on IaaS services over traditional
on-premise infrastructure to provide operational support to applications,
services and business processes. That happens because in this way, the costs of
an organization or business are reduced, since there is no need for an upfront
investment on the purchase of equipment. Also, the operational cost when using
IaaS services is based on flexible billing models according to the usage (of
the offered infrastructure resources). In addition, it is possible to scale the
offered remote infrastructure, depending on the needs of the organization and
the current workload of the services and applications to be supported. In this
way, the responsibility for the equipment and its maintenance is transferred to
third parties, while at the same a new model of trust is introduced between the
user/organization and the cloud provider. The increased interest shown by
enterprises when in comes to virtualization technologies (which are a key
foundation of IaaS services) in conjunction with the rapid rise in popularity
of container technologies such as Docker, has in turn begun to drive the
adoption of the microservices architecture for application development. An
architecture based on virtualization technologies for hosting applications in
cloud infrastructures and container technologies for partitioning their
functions and thus, providing an appropriate level of performance and
scalability \footfullcite{awsMicroservices}. However, the technologies in
question remain vulnerable to security issues that may affect the cloud itself
and/or the technologies on which it is based on.

}

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\textenglish{

In this paper we will first analyze the security issues related to the cloud
and in particular, those related to virtualization and container technologies.
Then, we will analyze how these 2 technologies can be used in a more secure
manner. However, the purpose of this paper goes beyond that and moves to a
practical level, proposing the solution of a tool that can implement the
proposed safe use of these technologies. In particular, this tool can not only
create virtual machines across multiple cloud providers but also harden them in
an automated manner. In addition, it is capable of installing the Docker
container engine on these virtual machines, which it can also harden. The main
goal of this work is to make it easier for an organization to install and
configure in an automated manner a secure, distributed environment for the
deployment and operation of a microservices application. This automation lies
in the correct configuration of the tool, which does not require any special
knowledge of technical or security issues in regard to infrastructure and
operating systems.

}

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\noindent \textbf{Keywords:} Cloud, Security, Virtualization, Containers, Micro-services, Automation
}

}

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