Access Control

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You can set access control using roles at the GCP project level. Assign a role to a GCP project member or service account to determine the level of access to your Google Cloud Platform project and its resources.

You can use primitive roles when you are working on smaller projects that have less complex needs. For more fine-tuned access controls, use Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, which include the App Engine predefined roles. To learn more about IAM, see the IAM documentation.

For information on how to assign roles, see Granting Project Access.

For fine-grained details about which permissions are granted to the predefined IAM roles, down to the method call level, see Roles in the Admin API docs.

Primitive roles

For App Engine applications, a GCP project member's role also controls the permissible actions of the command-line tools that are used to deploy and manage applications.

Role	GCP Console permissions	Tools permissions
Owner	Required to create App Engine applications. All viewer and editor privileges, plus the ability to view deployed source code, invite users, change user roles, and delete an application.	Required to create App Engine applications. Deploy application code and update all configurations.
Editor	View application information and edit application settings.	Deploy application code, update indexes/queues/crons.
Viewer	View application information.	Request logs

Predefined App Engine roles

The predefined roles for App Engine provide you with finer grained options for access control. Each role is listed with its targeted user, in the following table. Use the comparison table to view all role capabilities.

Role	Capabilities	Target User
App Engine Admin	Read/Write/Modify access to all application configuration and settings.	Application owner/administrator On-call engineer Sys Admin
App Engine Service Admin	Read-only access to all application configuration and settings. Write access to service-level and version-level settings, including traffic configuration. Cannot deploy versions of apps, see separation of duties below for details.	Release engineer DevOps On-call engineer Sys Admin
App Engine Deployer	Read-only access to all application configuration and settings. Write access only to deploy and create a new version. Delete old versions that are not serving traffic. Cannot modify an existing version, nor change traffic configuration. Note: The App Engine Deployer role alone grants adequate permission to deploy using the Admin API. To use other App Engine tooling, like gcloud commands, you must also have the Storage Admin role and Cloud Build Editor role. See the deployments section below for more information about the required roles.	Deployment account Release engineer
App Engine Viewer	Read-only access to all application configuration and settings.	User needing visibility into application, but not to modify it. Audit job checking App Engine configuration for policy compliance.
App Engine Code Viewer	Read-only access to all application configuration, settings, and deployed source code.	User needing visibility into application and its source code, but not to modify it. DevOps user needing to diagnose production issues.

Predefined roles comparison matrix

The following table provides a complete comparison of the capabilities of each predefined App Engine role.

Capability	App Engine Admin	App Engine Service Admin	App Engine Deployer	App Engine Viewer	App Engine Code Viewer
List all services, versions and instances	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
View all application, service, version, and instance settings	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
View runtime metrics such as resource usage, load information, and error information	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
View app source code	No	No	No	No	Yes
Deploy a new version of an app	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
Split or migrate traffic	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Start and stop a version	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Delete a version	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Delete an entire service	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Use SSH to connect to a VM instance in the flexible environment	Yes	No	No	No	No
Shut down an instance	Yes	No	No	No	No
Disable and re-enable the App Engine application	Yes	No	No	No	No
Access handlers that have a login:admin restriction	Yes	No	No	No	No
Update dispatch rules	Yes	No	No	No	No
Update DoS settings	Yes	No	No	No	No
Update cron schedules	No	No	No	No	No
Update default cookie expiration	Yes	No	No	No	No
Update referrers	Yes	No	No	No	No
Update Email API Authorized Senders	Yes	No	No	No	No

Note: The predefined roles are enforced in the GCP Console, the Admin API, and other tooling that requires access, including the deployment commands.

For details about the specific IAM permissions that are granted by each role, see the Roles section of the Admin API.

Deployments with predefined roles

The App Engine Deployer role is the recommended role for the user account that is responsible for only deploying a new version of an app. The App Engine Admin role is an alternative that includes additional administrative privileges, including the ability to deploy versions.

With either role, a user account is granted adequate permission to use the Admin API to deploy apps. To grant permission to use the gcloud commands or other App Engine tooling, you must also give the user account the Storage Admin role and Cloud Build Editor role.

For details about how to grant the required permissions, see Deploying using IAM Roles.

Separation of deployment and traffic routing duties

Many organizations prefer to separate the task of deploying an application version from the task of ramping up traffic to the newly created version, and to have these tasks done by different job functions. The App Engine Deployer and App Engine Service Admin roles provide this separation:

• App Engine Deployer role - User accounts are limited to deploying new versions and deleting old versions that are not serving traffic. The user account with the App Engine Deployer role won’t be able to configure traffic to any version nor change application-level settings such as dispatch rules or authentication domain.

• App Engine Service Admin role - User accounts cannot deploy a new version of an app nor change application-level settings. However, those accounts have privileges to change the properties of existing services and versions, including changing which versions can serve traffic. The App Engine Service Admin role is ideal for an Operations/IT department that handles ramping up traffic to newly deployed versions.

Permissions the predefined roles do NOT grant

None of the predefined roles listed above grant access to the following:

• Create App Engine applications.
• View and download application logs.
• View Monitoring charts in the GCP Console.
• Enable and Disable billing.
• Set up a daily Spending Limit (formerly known as Budget) for App Engine and view dollar amount spent.
• Run security scans in Cloud Security Scanner.
• Access configuration or data stored in Datastore, Task Queues, Memcache, Cloud Search or any other Cloud Platform storage product.

Service account for App Engine

After you create an App Engine application, the App Engine default service account is created and used as the identity of the App Engine service. The App Engine default service account is associated with your GCP project and executes tasks on behalf of your apps running in App Engine.

By default, the App Engine default service account has the Editor role in the project. This means that any user account with sufficient permissions to deploy changes to the GCP project can also run code with read/write access to all resources within that project.

Warning: Deleting the App Engine default service account breaks any current and future App Engine applications in your GCP project. For example, your application will lose access to other GCP services such as Cloud Datastore. If needed, you can restore a deleted default service account.

Service account for the flexible environment

In the App Engine flexible environment, there is also a Google-managed service account that executes flexible environment specific tasks on behalf of your apps. For more information about this service account, see Service Account for the App Engine Flexible Environment.

Changing service account permissions

You can change the permissions for your service accounts in GCP Console. For example, you can downgrade the permissions used by the App Engine default service account by changing its role from Editor to whichever role(s) that best represent the access needs for your App Engine application.

To change the permissions for your service accounts:

1. Open the GCP Console:

   Go to the Permissions page

2. In the Members list, locate the ID of the App Engine default service account.

   The App Engine default service account uses the member ID:
   [e-mail]

3. You can then use the dropdown menu to modify the roles assigned to the service account.

Important: App Engine instances in the flexible environment require Logs Writer permission. If you remove Project Editor permission from the App Engine default service account, be sure to add Logging > Logs Writer.

Using your service account

• To rename or create keys for your service accounts, including the App Engine app default service account, use the Service Accounts page in the GCP Console to view and edit your service accounts:

  Go to the Service Accounts page

• To run Cloud SDK commands using a service account, including any of the Cloud SDK development tools, you must first enable the Google App Engine Admin API in your Google Cloud Platform project. Use the API Library in the GCP Console to manage all of the APIs and Services in your GCP project:

  Go to the API Library page

Restoring a deleted default service account

If you delete your App Engine default service account, your App Engine application might break and lose access to other GCP services, such as Cloud Datastore.

You can restore a deleted App Engine default service account using the gcloud beta app repair command:

# Set your gcloud project
gcloud config set project <project-id>

# Restore your default service account
gcloud beta app repair