Authentication for using Google Cloud Platform API through Google Colab

Question

I am trying to use the Healthcare API, specifically the Healthcare Natural Language API for which there is this tutorial as well as this other one

The tutorial outlines how to run the API on a string; I've been tasked with figuring out how to make use of the API with a dataset of medical text data. I am most comfortable in Python out of all GCP options, so I attempted to run the code through Colab.

I used a service account json key for authentication, but this isn't best practice. So, I had to delete the key since we are dealing with patient data and everyone on my team is new to GCP.

In order for me to continue exploring running the Healthcare NLP API on a dataset rather than one string, I need to figure out authentication through a different method. In this regard, I have the following questions:

1. Pros/cons of me trying to run this through Colab?
2. Should I look to shifting to running my code within the GCP interface?
3. Are my choices Colab (and being forced to use a json key) vs working within GCP shell/terminal (with a plethora of authentication options)? This is what I gather from my research, but I am quite new to using APIs, working with cloud computing, etc.

I've tried to look into related tutorials such as this but their lack of direct relationship to what I am doing (ie: can't find one where the API being used is Healthcare), and my lack of familiarity with APIs and GCPs, I don't particularly understand what is going on + I keep seeing service accounts generally mentioned at one point or another, and I am not allowed to use service account keys for the time being.

Answer 1

Instead of using a service account you can use your own credentials, and supply them to your code using the "application default credentials". To set this up, make sure the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable is unset, then run gcloud auth application-default login (docs). After going through the login flow you can either generate an auth token manually, using gcloud auth application-default print-access-token, or you can use the Google client libraries, i.e.

from googleapiclient import discovery

api_version = "v1"
service_name = "healthcare"
# Returns an authorized API client by discovering the Healthcare API
# and using GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable.
client = discovery.build(service_name, api_version)

Under the hood this is using the application default credentials, you can also do with the google-auth Python package if you want.

You can find a summary of all the standard authentication methods here