[skj]

'gcloud auth activate-service-account' will auth using a JWT, acquired from the Cloud Console.

Also, if you are running stuff in Google Compute Engine, no auth flow is needed at all: there is a metadata service that you can connect to (and gcloud connects to by default) that provides credentials associated with the machine you're on.

> It's like these guys have never heard of devops.

:\ yeah...I can't imagine trying to automate a web login flow with ansible...but no one would ever suggest you do that.

(disclosure: I wrote most of the client-side auth code for gcloud)