GKE Workload Identity Federation Troubleshooting Skill

Use this skill to systematically diagnose why a Pod using Workload Identity Federation for GKE cannot authenticate to Google Cloud APIs. Typical symptoms:

• HTTP/403 ... Permission 'iam.serviceAccounts.getAccessToken' denied on resource
• google.auth.exceptions ... could not find default credentials / ComputeEngineCredentials cannot find the metadata server
• API calls that unexpectedly use the node's default Compute Engine service account instead of the workload's identity.

Attribution