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A service account represents a non-human or machine identity, which can automate common tasks across teams and projects. Service accounts are ideal for CI/CD pipelines, automated training jobs, and other machine-to-machine workflows. Key benefits of service accounts:
  • No license consumption: Service accounts do not consume user seats or licenses
  • Dedicated API keys: Secure credentials for automated workflows
  • User attribution: Optionally attribute automated runs to human users
  • Enterprise-ready: Built for production automation at scale
  • Delegated operations: Service accounts operate on behalf of the user or organization that creates them
Among other things, service accounts are useful for tracking automated jobs logged to wandb, like periodic retraining, nightly builds, and so on. If you’d like, you can associate a username with one of these machine-launched runs with the environment variables WANDB_USERNAME or WANDB_USER_EMAIL. For comprehensive information about service accounts, including best practices and detailed setup instructions, refer to Use service accounts to automate workflows. For information about how service accounts behave in team contexts, refer to Team Service Account Behavior. To create a new team-scoped service account and API key:
  1. In your team’s settings, click Service Accounts.
  2. Click New Team Service Account.
  3. Provide a name for the service account.
  4. Set Authentication Method to Generate API key (default). If you select Federated Identity, the service account cannot own API keys.
  5. Click Create.
  6. Find the service account you just created.
  7. Click the action menu (...), then click Create API key.
  8. Provide a name for the API key, then click Create.
  9. Copy the API key and store it securely.
  10. Click Done.
Apart from the Built-in service accounts, W&B also supports External service accounts using identity federation for SDK and CLI. Use external service accounts if you are looking to automate W&B tasks using service identities managed in your identity provider that can issue JSON Web Tokens (JWT).