# Step 1: Create a BigQuery Service Account Key File


You can connect to BigQuery with a user account or a service account. A *service account* is a special kind of account designed to be used by applications or compute workloads, rather than a person.

Service accounts don’t have passwords and use a unique email address for identification. You can associate each service account with a service account key, which is a public or private RSA key pair. In this walkthrough, we use a service account key in AWS SCT to access your BigQuery project.

 **To create a BigQuery service account key** 

1. Sign in to the [Google Cloud management console](https://console.cloud.google.com/).

1. Make sure that you have API enabled on your [BigQuery API](https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/library/bigquery.googleapis.com) page. If you don’t see **API Enabled**, choose **Enable**.

1. On the [Service accounts](https://console.cloud.google.com/iam-admin/serviceaccounts) page, choose your BigQuery project, and then choose **Create service account**.

1. On the **Service account details** page, enter a descriptive value for **Service account name**. Choose **Create and continue**. The **Grant this service account access to the project** page opens.

1. For **Select a role**, choose **BigQuery**, and then choose **BigQuery Admin**. AWS SCT uses permissions to manage all resources within the project to load your BigQuery metadata in the migration project.

1. Choose **Add another role**. For **Select a role**, choose **Cloud Storage**, and then choose **Storage Admin**. AWS SCT uses full control of data objects and buckets to extract your data from BigQuery and then load it into Amazon Redshift.

1. Choose **Continue**, and then choose **Done**.

1. On the [Service accounts](https://console.cloud.google.com/iam-admin/serviceaccounts) page, choose the service account that you created.

1. Choose **Keys**, **Add key**, **Create new key**.

1. Choose **JSON**, and then choose **Create**. Choose the folder to save your private key or check the default folder for downloads in your browser.