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\textenglish{

\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. This is because in this way, the costs of an
organization or business are reduced, since there is no need for an investment
on the purchase of equipment. Also, the operational costs 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 a new model of trust is introduced between the
user/organization and the cloud provider. The increased interest shown by
enterprises for 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, they 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 on these virtual
machines the Docker container engine, 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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\textenglish{
\noindent \textbf{Keywords:} Cloud, Security, Virtualization, Containers, Micro-services, Automation
}

}

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