Prerequisites

• 1: Hardware Requirements
• 1.1: CoCo without Hardware
• 1.2: Secure Execution Host Setup
• 1.3: SEV-SNP Host Setup
• 1.4: SGX Host Setup
• 1.5: TDX Host Setup
• 2: Cloud Hardware
• 3: Cluster Setup

1 - Hardware Requirements

Confidential Computing is a hardware technology. Confidential Containers supports multiple hardware platforms and can leverage cloud hardware. If you do not have bare metal hardware and will deploy Confidential Containers with a cloud integration, continue to the cloud section.

You can also run Confidential Containers without hardware support for testing or development.

The Confidential Containers operator, which is described in the following section, does not setup the host kernel, firmware, or system configuration. Before installing Confidential Containers on a bare metal system, make sure that your node can start confidential VMs.

This section will describe the configuration that is required on the host.

Regardless of your platform, it is recommended to have at least 8GB of RAM and 4 cores on your worker node.

1.1 - CoCo without Hardware

For testing or development, Confidential Containers can be deployed without any hardware support.

This is referred to as a coco-dev or non-tee. A coco-dev deployment functions the same way as Confidential Containers with an enclave, but a non-confidential VM is used instead of a confidential VM. This does not provide any security guarantees, but it can be used for testing.

No additional host configuration is required as long as the host supports virtualization.

1.2 - Secure Execution Host Setup

TODO

1.3 - SEV-SNP Host Setup

TODO

1.4 - SGX Host Setup

TODO

1.5 - TDX Host Setup

TODO

2 - Cloud Hardware

Confidential Containers can be deployed via confidential computing cloud offerings. The main method of doing this is to use the cloud-api-adaptor also known as “peer pods.”

Some clouds also support starting confidential VMs inside of non-confidential VMs. With Confidential Containers these offerings can be used as if they were bare-metal.

3 - Cluster Setup

Confidential Containers requires Kubernetes. A cluster must be installed before running the operator. Many different clusters can be used but they should meet the following requirements.

• The minimum Kubernetes version is 1.24
• Cluster must use containerd or cri-o.
• At least one node has the label node-role.kubernetes.io/worker=.
• SELinux is not enabled.

If you use Minikube or Kind to setup your cluster, you will only be able to use runtime classes based on Cloud Hypervisor due to an issue with QEMU.