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

Learn service account logic, use cases and the unavoidable business problem they solve.

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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.