**Why Service Accounts (SA)**: Non-human identities for apps, VMs, Cloud Functions. No passwords to rotate; IAM-bound. **Architecture**: Create SA in IAM; assign roles (least privilege). Attach to VM, Cloud Run, Dataflow, Composer. For GKE/Cloud Run: use Workload Identity—pod/container gets SA without key files. Workload Identity Federation extends to AWS/Azure for cross-cloud. **Scalability**: One SA per application/service; avoid shared SAs....
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