Google Cloud Platform Cookbook

Creating service accounts

A service account is a non-user account generated by the GCP for services or manually created for our applications. When a service account is attached to an application, it assumes the identity of the service account and thus avoids storing credentials at the application level. The services which can be accessed by the service account can be managed via IAM.

In addition to applications assuming the service account's access, users can also use the service account to access resources. In this recipe, we'll create a service account and use it to verify access to Cloud SQL.