Service Accounts
Service accounts are non-human identities used by applications, services, or automated processes to authenticate and interact with systems, APIs, or resources. They provide a secure way for software components to access services without using personal user credentials, often managed through tokens, keys, or certificates. This concept is widely implemented in cloud platforms, container orchestration, and enterprise systems to enable secure machine-to-machine communication.
Developers should learn about service accounts when building applications that need automated access to cloud services (e.g., Google Cloud, AWS, Azure), Kubernetes pods requiring API access, or CI/CD pipelines interacting with external systems. They are essential for security best practices, as they allow fine-grained permission management, audit logging, and reduce the risk of credential exposure compared to using personal accounts. Use cases include deploying applications that call cloud APIs, managing infrastructure as code, or automating backups.