Service Accounts

Service accounts represent non-human machine users, like applications or deployment pipelines, that require programmatic access to a discrete set of secrets. Service accounts are used to:

• Appropriately scope the selection of secrets a machine user has access to.

• Issue access tokens to facilitate programmatic access to, and the ability to decrypt, edit, and create secrets.

Secrets that your user account has access to are listed in the primary Secrets Manager view as well as by selecting Service accounts from the navigation:

Opening a service account will list the Secrets and People the service account has access to, as well as any generated Access tokens:

On your organization's Subscription page you are able to assign the number of service accounts available for use in your organization. For additional information regarding your available service accounts, and service account scaling, see here.

To create a new service account:

1. Use the New dropdown to select Service account:

   

2. Enter a Service account name and select Save.

3. Open the service account and, in the Projects tab, type or select the name of the project(s) that this service account should be able to access. For each added project, select a level of Permissions:

   • Can read: Service account can retrieve secrets from assigned projects.

   • Can read, write: Service account can retrieve and edit secrets from assigned projects, create new secrets in assigned projects, or create new projects altogether.

Adding organization members to a service account will allow those people to generate access tokens for the service account and interact with all secrets the service account has access to. To add people to your service account:

1. In the service account, select the People tab.

2. From the people dropdown, type or select the members or groups to add to the project. Once you've selected the right people, select the Add button:

   

Adding projects to a service account will allow programmatic access to included secrets using access tokens. You can add both new and existing projects to a service account:

To delete a service account, use the () options menu for the service account to delete to select Delete service account. Deleting a service account will not delete the secrets associated with it. Service accounts are fully removed once deleted and do not get sent to the trash like secrets do.