Google Cloud Armor is a security service that helps protect your applications from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other web-based threats. It provides a robust set of tools to create and manage security policies that can be applied to your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources.

1. DDoS Protection: Cloud Armor helps mitigate large-scale DDoS attacks, ensuring your applications remain available.
2. Web Application Firewall (WAF): Provides customizable rules to filter and monitor HTTP traffic to and from your web applications.
3. Security Policies: Define rules to allow or deny traffic based on various attributes such as IP address, geographic location, and request headers.
4. Preconfigured WAF Rules: Google provides a set of preconfigured WAF rules to protect against common web vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS).

Before you can use Cloud Armor, you need to enable the Cloud Armor API in your GCP project.

A security policy is a set of rules that define how to handle incoming traffic.

You can add rules to your security policy to allow or deny traffic based on specific conditions.

Once your security policy is defined, you can apply it to a backend service.

Let's walk through a practical example of setting up Cloud Armor to protect a web application hosted on GCP.

You have a web application running on a Compute Engine instance, and you want to protect it from DDoS attacks and common web vulnerabilities.

1. Enable APIs: Ensure the necessary APIs are enabled.

   gcloud services enable compute.googleapis.com
   gcloud services enable cloudarmor.googleapis.com
   

2. Create a Security Policy: Create a new security policy.

   gcloud compute security-policies create web-app-security-policy --description "Security policy for web application"
   

3. Add Rules: Add rules to the security policy to allow traffic from the US and deny all other traffic.

   gcloud compute security-policies rules create 1000 
           --security-policy web-app-security-policy 
           --expression "origin.region_code == 'US'" 
           --action "allow"
   
   gcloud compute security-policies rules create 2000 
           --security-policy web-app-security-policy 
           --action "deny-403"
   

4. Apply Security Policy: Apply the security policy to your backend service.

   gcloud compute backend-services update web-app-backend-service 
           --security-policy web-app-security-policy
   

1. Objective: Create a security policy that allows traffic only from Europe and denies all other traffic.
2. Steps:
   • Enable the necessary APIs.
   • Create a security policy named europe-only-policy.
   • Add rules to allow traffic from Europe.
   • Apply the security policy to a backend service named europe-backend-service.

1. Objective: Implement preconfigured WAF rules to protect against SQL injection and XSS attacks.
2. Steps:
   • Create a security policy named waf-policy.
   • Add preconfigured WAF rules for SQL injection and XSS.
   • Apply the security policy to a backend service named waf-backend-service.

In this section, you learned about Google Cloud Armor and how it can help protect your applications from DDoS attacks and other web-based threats. You also learned how to create and manage security policies, add rules, and apply these policies to backend services. By completing the exercises, you gained hands-on experience in setting up and configuring Cloud Armor to secure your GCP resources.