Everything Your Cloud Provider Won’t Tell You About Service Accounts

Cloud Service Account 101

As nearly all of personal and professional communication is filtered through Google and Microsoft email products, a friend of mine has the misfortune of having a .yahoo domain, which many of these filters have equated with spam.

So, in addition to agonizing over subject lines or spell-checking the email body, they have additional hurdles to clear: Proving legitimacy and maintaining an account that can reliably and securely deliver communication.

In a way, this is not dissimilar from the functionality of service accounts which offer developers a secure, reliable and (mostly) convenient means of communication.

Except instead of communicating with an individual, you’re creating a means to “talk to” the components of your cloud-based infrastructure.

For instance, your service account might be able to “talk” to a VM or (Google) sheet. Since a separate account manages these communications, you don’t need to worry about giving your individual account every IAM role.

Like many data and tech-oriented concepts, a service account is convenient and efficient — in theory.

Implementation is an entirely different battle.

Cloud services like GCP and AWS have pages of documentation on their service accounts. However, these mostly cover specific permissions and functions.

My goal is to provide a big picture overview of service accounts because before you rush to implementation, you need to gain understanding.

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