Difference between Google managed service account and default service account in GCP

Question

I've been reading the Google Cloud documentation and can't exactly figure out what the difference between these two are. I know that both of them are automatically created in GCP, but I really don't know much more.

Answer 1

You aren't alone, and that's why google has started a new video series on this topic. To summarize,

• The Google managed service account are account created on Google side (managed by Google, you can't delete them) but that you can grant on your project to allow them to perform actions. They are also named service agent. They are used when you used serverless product, such as Cloud Build for example, or Cloud Run (to pull the image, not to run the instance)
• The default service account (mainly Compute Engine default service account and App Engine default service account) are service account created automatically in YOUR project (so managed by you, you can delete them if you want) when you activate some APIs. They are used by default when you create some service's instance.