CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-cloud-platformservice-accounts
MI Haque
MI Haque

Reputation: 53

Why service account based authentication is preferred over user accounts

I have seen many places in GCP documentation that service account based authentication is recommended over user account based. I couldn't find what is the actual reason behind it

Upvotes: 1

Views: 129

Answers (1)

John Hanley
John Hanley

Reputation: 81336

Imagine that you have a service A running on compute A. You want service A to communicate with another service B running on compute B AND you want to use some form of protection (authorization) to only allow A and B to communicate and return errors for everything else.

If you use User Authentication, a person must be involved to authorize communication. Not practical for programs running on computers in the cloud.

Google implemented service accounts to provide authorization of machine to machine communication. The secrets are stored in a file. These secrets create a Token that is passed between services.

Upvotes: 2

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