Agent skill · google
google-cloud-recipe-auth
Provides expert guidance on authenticating and authorizing to Google Cloud services and APIs, covering human users, service identities, Application Default Credentials (ADC), and best practices for secure access.
What it needs
About 6k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Authenticating to Google Cloud Authentication is the process of proving who you are. In Google Cloud, you represent a Principal (an identity like a user or a service). This is the first step before Authorization (determining what you can do). Authentication Clarifying Questions for the Agent Before providing a specific solution, clarify the following with the user: 1. Who or what is authenticating? (A human developer, a local script, or an application running in production?) 2. Where is the code running? (Local laptop, Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, or another cloud like AWS/Azure?) 3. What is the target? (A Google Cloud API like Storage/BigQuery, or a custom application you built?) 4. Are you using a high-level client library? (e.g., Python, Go, Node.js libraries usually handle ADC automatically.) --- Human Authentication For users to access Google Cloud, they need an identity that Google Cloud can recognize. Types of User Identities Google Cloud supports several ways to configure identities for your internal workforce (developers, administrators, employees): Google-Managed Accounts: You can use Cloud Identity or Google Workspace to create managed user accounts. These are called managed accounts because your organization controls their lifecycle and configuration. Federation using Cloud Identity or Google Workspace: You can federate identities to allow users to use their existing identity and credentials to sign in to Google services. Users authenticate against an external identity provider (IdP), but you must keep accounts synchronized into Google Cloud using tools like Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS) or an external authoritative source like Active Directory or Microsoft Entra ID. Workforce Identity Federation: This lets you use an external IdP to authenticate and authorize a workforce using IAM directly. Unlike standard federation, you do not need to synchronize user identities from your existing IdP to Google Cloud identities. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills google/google-cloud-recipe-auth--8bf682