A service account is a non-human identity used by applications, systems, or automation tools to authenticate with APIs and cloud services. Service accounts have their own permissions, credentials, and access policies, enabling secure machine-to-machine communication. They often use key files, tokens, or IAM roles to authenticate.
Why it matters
Service accounts allow automated systems to interact securely without exposing user credentials. They support least-privilege access, auditability, and safe automation across cloud and on-prem environments.
Examples
A CI pipeline using a Google Cloud service account to deploy infrastructure or a backend workload using an AWS IAM role. Lessons about cloud identity management expand on this concept.