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\noindent Today, more and more people rely on IaaS
(Infrastructure-as-a-Service) services over a traditional on-premise
infrastructure to provide computational support to applications, services and
business processes. This is due to the fact that 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 of 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 time a new trust model 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 into a set of containers and thus, providing an appropriate level of
performance and scalability \cite{awsMicroservices}. However, such applications
remain vulnerable to security issues that may be tied to the cloud and/or the
technologies on which it is based.

}

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In this thesis 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 two technologies can be used in a more secure
manner. However, the purpose of this thesis goes beyond that and moves to a
more practical level by 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 our tool, which does not require any special
knowledge on technical or security issues concerning the infrastructure and
operating systems.

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\textenglish{
\noindent \textbf{Keywords:} Cloud, Security, Virtualization, Virtual Machines, Containers, Container Engine, Micro-services, Automation, Hardening
}

}

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