Secure boot of virtualized computing instances

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing one or more instructions which when executed by one or more processors cause the one or more processors to perform steps comprising:

• encrypting, by one or more on-premises devices, a system image under a data encryption key (DEK) to generate a wrapped system image, wherein the system image represents a snapshot of a guest operating system;
• encrypting, by the one or more on-premises devices, the DEK under a key encryption key (KEK) to generate a wrapped DEK;
• establishing, by the one or more on-premises devices, a secure connection to a key management service;
• sending, by the one or more on-premises devices, a request to wrap the KEK with an account root key to the key management service;
• receiving, by the one or more on-premises devices, a wrapped KEK that has been wrapped with the account root key from the key management service;
• writing, by the one or more on-premises devices, the wrapped DEK and the wrapped KEK onto a label of the wrapped system image prior to uploading the wrapped system image to the virtual data center;
• uploading, by the one or more on-premises devices, the wrapped system image, wrapped DEK, and wrapped KEK to a virtual data center, wherein the virtual data center stores an intermediary guest manager machine image;
• generating, by the virtual data center, an encrypted machine image by merging the wrapped system image into the intermediary guest manager machine image, wherein the intermediary guest manager machine image represents a snapshot of an intermediary guest manager;
• launching, by the virtual data center, an instance based on the encrypted machine image, wherein the instance represents the guest operating system executing on a virtual environment in which the guest operating system or one or more applications executing on the guest operating system issue one or more requests which are intercepted by the intermediary guest manager which then effectuates the one or more requests by invoking a hypervisor.