Impact of GCP session length on OAuth clients

Once you’ve signed in on google.com, the Cloud Console, or any other Google site, your browser session remains valid for multiple days. Not being prompted to sign in over and over again is convenient and at least in typical consumer scenarios, the risk that comes along with keeping the session is limited.

Things can look different in a corporate scenario where users might have access to sensitive data. Keeping sessions alive for 14 days (which is the default) might seem a little risky and might not be in line with an enterprise’s idea of security. G Suite Business and Cloud Identity Premium therefore allow you to change the default session length to a different period such as 8 hours. This setting applies to all Google services, not only GCP.

Recently, Google introduced another way to control session lifetime by allowing you to control the session length for Cloud Console and gcloud sessions.