Concepts

Key concepts

• Overview

  Introduces basic concepts to help you understand IAM.

• Understanding roles

  Describes the predefined roles for IAM, and identifies the permissions in each role.

• Understanding custom roles

  Describes custom roles for IAM, which enable you to provide different sets of permissions than the predefined roles.

• Service accounts

  Explains how your applications can use service accounts to access your resources.

• Workload identity federation

  Explains how your external workloads can use identity federation to access resources.

• Understanding policies

  Describes how IAM controls access to a resource by attaching a policy to that resource.

• Conditions

  Explains conditional, attribute-based access control for Google Cloud resources.

• Tags and access control

  Explains how you can use tags to help you control access to specific resources.

• Help secure IAM with VPC Service Controls

  Explains how VPC Service Controls work with IAM.

Policy Intelligence

• Policy Intelligence tools

  Lists and describes the Policy Intelligence tools, which help you understand and manage your IAM policies.

• Enforce least privilege with role recommendations

  Describes IAM role recommendations, which help you ensure that your principals have only the permissions that they actually use.

• Policy Simulator

  Explains Policy Simulator, which helps you see how a policy change might impact a principal's access before you commit to making the change.

Audit logging

• IAM audit logging

  Details about information that IAM logs when you call its APIs.

• Service account audit logging

  Examples of the audit logs that are generated when you work with a service account.

• Workload identity federation audit logging

  Examples of the audit logs that are generated when you use workload identity pools for identity federation.

Best practices

• Using resource hierarchy for access control

  Best practices to consider as you decide how to manage access to your resources.

• Understanding service accounts

  Best practices to take into account when using IAM service accounts.

• Best practices for using and managing service accounts

  Best practices to take into account for managing, using, and securing service accounts.

• Best practices for securing service accounts

  Best practices to take into account for limiting the privileges of service accounts and protecting them from being abused.

• Best practices for managing service account keys

  Best practices to take into account for managing your service account keys.

• Using IAM securely

  Best practices for users who are proficient with IAM.

• IAM roles for billing-related job functions

  IAM roles for users who manage billing tasks.

• IAM roles for networking-related job functions

  IAM roles for users who manage networking tasks.

• IAM roles for auditing-related job functions

  IAM roles for users who manage auditing.