Creating a Cloud Identity

Suppose you use a Google Cloud free trial, as described in the Billing and budgets section in Chapter 3, to learn about the platform or use Google Cloud for small personal projects. To keep things simple, as you are the only user, you probably use your @gmail account, assigning it a Project Owner role for every project you create. The following figure shows an example of such a configuration:

Figure 12.1 – Multiple personal projects owned by a single user

This approach is a good fit for small projects owned by a single user or just a few users, but a more scalable solution is needed for an enterprise. First, to manage access for multiple users and groups, and second, to provide a hierarchy of resources to match a large organization’s structure – departments, teams, or applications. This is where Google’s identity service comes into play as an alternative to using individual @gmail.com accounts.

Google...