Google Cloud Platform for Architects

Creating a Service Account

Service accounts in GCP are affiliated with application or resources (such as Compute Engine VM). One service account can link to multiple resources. It is created in order to avoid conflict with user account and to call the Google APIs of services. These accounts are then given permissions to access or edit resources or data. There are two types of service accounts:

• User managed service accounts
• Google managed service accounts

Service accounts are authenticated via GCP managed key-pairs. The keys are rotated almost every week. Optionally, we can also create external keys to be used as default application credentials and so on.

To create a service account, following are the steps:

1. From the dashboard of the console, ...