Secure server and compute nodes

Provisioning compute nodes among a plurality of compute nodes, which may be a cloud computing service, by first receiving an anonymised access token from a provider of the compute nodes 24. It then requests the identities of a subset of the compute nodes from the plurality of the compute nodes 34, and selects at least one of the nodes from this subset 42. It then provides the anonymised access token to a secure enclave of the select node or nodes 44. It then provides an anonymised identity of the requestor to the secure enclave and validates the use of the anonymised identity with the access token to provision the compute node to the requestor 46. The anonymised access token may include payment confirmation and the node may be provisioned for a finite time period 54, after which the system may reboot or reset the compute node 56.