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DevOps & Automation · Intermediate

Service Account

A Kubernetes identity for processes running in pods to authenticate to the API server and, via federation, to cloud services.

Definition

Each namespace has a default service account. Pods receive short-lived projected tokens. Cloud integrations (IRSA/EKS Pod Identity, Azure Workload Identity, GKE Workload Identity) map service accounts to cloud IAM roles.

Example

spec.serviceAccountName: reporter with automountServiceAccountToken: false where API access is not needed.

Exam tip

Do not grant the default service account broad permissions; disable token automount when not required.

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