Imagine your Firebase project is like a company. That company has different employees (robots), and each robot has a job.

You created a Firebase project

Google automatically gives you some "robot workers" to help with stuff behind the scenes. These are called service accounts.

Each one has a special job, like:

Service Account Like a... Job

[email protected] Worker Runs your Cloud Functions

firebase-adminsdk-xxxxx@... Assistant Talks to Firebase for you when you use Admin SDK (like send notification, create users)

firebase-service-account@... Tool guy Helps Firebase do tasks like linking services

[email protected] Manager Used by App Engine to run things behind the scenes

[email protected] You You are the boss. You can give them jobs (roles)

What’s a role?

A role is like a “key” or “permission”. If a robot doesn’t have the right key, it can’t do the job.

So for example:

Your Cloud Function wants to write to Firestore ➜ The compute@developer robot needs a key called Firestore Writer.

You want to use Firebase Admin SDK to create users ➜ The firebase-adminsdk@... robot needs a key called Firebase Auth Admin.

So, what should you do?

If something doesn’t work, like:

“My function can’t write to Firestore”

“I can’t access Cloud Vision API”

“My Firebase Extension gives permission error”

You probably need to give the correct robot the right role (key) in IAM.