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Cloud Computing · Intermediate

Service Account (Google Cloud)

Google Cloud identity used by applications and workloads rather than people, authenticated with short-lived tokens or keys.

Definition

Service accounts are both principals (granted roles) and resources (others can be allowed to impersonate them). Workloads on Compute Engine, Cloud Run and GKE use attached service accounts to get tokens from the metadata server. Best practices are to avoid downloadable keys, avoid the broad default Compute Engine service account and grant roles/iam.serviceAccountUser carefully.

Example

A Cloud Run service runs as order-api@project.iam.gserviceaccount.com, which holds only Pub/Sub publisher and Firestore user roles.

Exam tip

Exams favor attaching dedicated least-privilege service accounts and Workload Identity Federation over creating service account keys.

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