Is there anything else to these confidential machines other than feel-good, security theater or certification checkmarks?<p>Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I don't quite understand the target audience.<p>For basic security and isolation between tenants as well as intrusion prevention from third parties, I'd personally trust Google's SRE team more than any other cloud provider in the world. They seem to have a great historical record and if they had any slip ups there, their business would be impacted for years.<p>For access to state actors, I'd trust these machines not any bit more than conventional ones. If the key is held in memory, it's accessible. Even if it wasn't, the data would be captured at the storage layer boundary if it was of any interest.
If one can give strong proof that everything done in a VM is encrypted, then would it be possible to create a "decentralized cloud provider", in which data center owners agree to a common spec for services?