Authenticating to your GCP account

You have to create a service account within your GCP project to enable programmatic access to the GCP API—which is how Ansible interacts with the GCP cloud to provision resources. A service account functions similarly to a user but is exclusively designed for API access. In our setup, we created a service account named Ansible and assigned it the Project Owner role, granting it full privileges to create and manage resources in the project. However, in production environments, assigning a more restrictive role to limit its permissions is recommended.

For authentication, GCP provides a JSON file containing the credentials and identification information for the service account. This file is essential for authenticating to the GCP API and includes key details such as the following:

• The private key associated with the service account
• The account type
• project_id
• client_id
• client_email

This JSON file...