Google Cloud Platform is gaining momentum, and it seems that Google is warming up to compete with Amazon Web Services. During the last quarter, Google has invested heavily on new services and features for both Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine. Like any other cloud computing platform, also for Google one of the key components is the Identity and Access Management (IAM). This tool is fundamental to assign the right permission to users, groups and entire departments that could use a cloud computing platform like Google Cloud Platform or AWS.
Google Cloud IAM is currently tied up with the Google account of the user.
If you want to grant access to any user (member), you need to invite the user with his Gmail ID only. As of now, you can grant only 3 high-level permissions to access the resources:
Is owner – is a Cloud Platform Administrator user, he has full control on the Projects, Permissions, and Cloud Resources
Can edit – is a Cloud Power User, he has full control only on the Cloud Resources
Can view – is a Read-Only user, he has read-only permissions on all the cloud resources
If you want to grant any of the above permission for any user, the user will have the complete access on all the Compute Engine resources like VM Instances, Disks, Networks, Load balancing, Routes, Firewalls and etc. There is no granular level of permissions to allow/deny access to the resources. This will put the customer workloads exposed to high risks with respect to privacy, security, and availability.
If I want to create a user with some administrator privileges to allow only creation of VMs, Creation of Disks and Snapshots but deny the Firewalls access, termination/deletion of any other resources, right now I don’t have any way to do it.
I spent the last three quarters working with Google Compute Engine and I came up with a list of features that would be great and would add a lot of value to Google Compute Engine:
All of them are improvements that Google will likely release in the next months, but in the meantime, you should consider them before moving your applications and workloads to the Google Cloud Platform.
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