What is the purpose of service accounts in GCP?

Service accounts in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are designed to provide identities specifically for applications and services, allowing them to authenticate and authorize themselves when interacting with GCP resources. This is crucial for enabling secure access to services and APIs without the need for user credentials.

Service accounts facilitate automation and server-to-server interactions, where applications must perform tasks like accessing Cloud Storage, executing functions in Cloud Run, or querying BigQuery. Since service accounts operate like a regular user account but are associated with applications rather than individual users, they allow for role-based access control. This means you can assign permissions that define what resources the service account can access and what operations it can perform.

In contrast, the other choices focus on unrelated functionalities. Storing user data securely pertains to data management and security practices, monitoring cloud performance relates to observing resource utilization, and enhancing network security focuses on protecting the cloud network, none of which directly describe the primary function of service accounts.