GCP Security Overview

Access to an GCP cloud instance can be controlled by 

• an external firewall,
• the operating system firewall of the instance,
• GCP-specific firewall settings.

In addition to allowing SSH access, the different firewall levels must be configured to permit at least TCP port 8080 to enable license server access.

Connecting to the Cloud Instance

During the configuration of your instance you should have created a security group allowing at the minimum SSH access to the instance. If this has been done correctly, you can, for example, use SSH from the command-line or from a tool such as PuTTY to access the command-line of the user sshuser on the Charon-SSP instance.

You will need the following:

• Access to the private key associated with the public key you uploaded during the configuration of the instance.
• The public IP address of the instance.

Please note: the file permissions of the private key file must be set such that the file is only readable by the user (e.g., # chmod 400 <private-key-file>).

There are several ways to connect to your Charon-SSP cloud instance using this basic SSH protocol access. Some of them are described in the following sections below.