Identity management for Google Cloud

To use Google Cloud, users and workloads need an identity that Google Cloud can recognize.

This page outlines the methods that you can use to configure identities for users and workloads.

User identities

There are several ways to configure user identities so that Google Cloud can recognize them:

• Create Cloud Identity or Google Workspace accounts: Users with Cloud Identity or Google Workspace accounts can authenticate to Google Cloud and be authorized to use Google Cloud resources. Cloud Identity and Google Workspace accounts are user accounts that are managed by your organization.

Note: Google Workspace accounts may have one or more alternate email addresses (email alias). If you grant a role to a principal's email alias, the role is granted to the primary email instead. It's not possible to grant a role to only the email alias.

Warning: Granting a role to a principal's email alias reveals the primary email.

• Set up one of the following federated identity strategies:

  • Federation using Cloud Identity or Google Workspace: Sync external identities with corresponding Cloud Identity or Google Workspace accounts so that users can sign in to Google services with their external credentials. With this method, users need two accounts: an external account, and a Cloud Identity or Google Workspace account. You can keep these accounts synchronized using a tool like Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS).
  • Workforce Identity Federation: Use your external identity provider (IdP) to sign in your users to Google Cloud and let them access Google Cloud resources and products. With Workforce Identity Federation, users need only one account: their external account. This type of user identity is sometimes referred to as a federated identity.

To learn more about these methods for setting up user identities, see User identities overview.

Workload identities

Google Cloud provides the following types of identity services for workloads:

• Workload Identity Federation lets your workloads access most Google Cloud services by using an identity that is provided by an IdP. Workloads that use Workload Identity Federation can run on Google Cloud, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), or other platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and GitHub.

• Google Cloud service accounts can act as identities for workloads. Instead of granting access to a workload directly, you grant access to a service account, then let the workload use the service account as its identity.

• Managed workload identities (Preview) let you bind strongly attested identities to your Compute Engine workloads. You can use managed workload identities to authenticate your workloads to other workloads using mutual TLS (mTLS), but they cannot be used for authenticating to Google Cloud APIs.

The methods that you can use depend on where your workloads are running.

If you're running workloads on Google Cloud, you can use the following methods to configure workload identities:

• Workload Identity Federation for GKE: Grant IAM access to GKE clusters and Kubernetes service accounts. Doing so lets the clusters' workloads access most Google Cloud services directly, without using IAM service account impersonation.

• Attached service accounts: Attach a service account to a resource so that the service account acts as the resource's default identity. Any workloads running on the resource use the service account's identity when accessing Google Cloud services.

• Short-lived service account credentials: Generate and use short-lived service account credentials whenever your resources need to access to Google Cloud services. The most common types of credentials are OAuth 2.0 access tokens and OpenID Connect (OIDC) ID tokens.

If you're running workloads outside of Google Cloud, you can use the following methods to configure workload identities:

• Workload Identity Federation: Use credentials from external identity providers to generate short-lived credentials, which workloads can use to temporarily impersonate service accounts. Workloads can then access Google Cloud resources, using the service account as their identity.

• Service account keys: Use the private portion of a service account's public/private RSA key pair to authenticate as the service account.

  Important: Service account keys are a security risk if not managed correctly. You should choose a more secure alternative to service account keys whenever possible. If you must authenticate with a service account key, you are responsible for the security of the private key and for other operations described by Best practices for managing service account keys. If you are prevented from creating a service account key, service account key creation might be disabled for your organization. For more information, see Managing secure-by-default organization resources.

To learn more about these methods for setting up workload identities, see Workload identities overview.