1.3 IAM and Service Accounts

Description and Key Takeaways

Welcome back to Module 1! In this session, we’re diving into the most critical security topic for any cloud professional: Identity and Access Management (IAM). This video will equip you with a foundational understanding of how to control who can do what within your Google Cloud environment, a skill that is paramount for protecting your data and resources.

The video is structured around a simple question: “Who can do what on which resource?” We’ll break down IAM by defining its three core components:

• Principals: We’ll define who can be an identity in GCP, including human users (Google Accounts), groups of users (Google Groups), and, most importantly for a data engineer, non-human identities like Service Accounts.
• Roles: We’ll explain that roles are collections of permissions, and we’ll differentiate between the broad, primitive roles (like Owner, Editor, and Viewer) and the more granular, predefined roles that are highly recommended for most use cases. We’ll also touch on the concept of custom roles for even finer-grained access control.
• Permissions: This is the most granular level, representing a single, specific action, such as storage.objects.get or bigquery.datasets.create. You’ll learn how permissions are bundled into roles, which are then assigned to principals.

A significant portion of the video is dedicated to Service Accounts, explaining why they are the go-to choice for applications and virtual machines that need to interact with other GCP services programmatically. You’ll learn that a service account is an identity for your application and how assigning it specific roles is a secure way to grant programmatic access.

Finally, we’ll wrap up the video by discussing essential IAM Best Practices. We will emphasize the principle of least privilege—only granting the minimum access necessary—and we’ll cover key tips like granting roles to groups instead of individuals and avoiding the use of primitive roles in production environments.

By the end of this video, you will have a clear and actionable understanding of IAM, enabling you to make secure and effective access management decisions as you build your data pipelines.