403 “Request had insufficient authentication scopes” during gcloud container cluster get-credentials

Question

From a VM in GCE, I did the following

gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file 
# \"blah\" is a service account key file (JSON) I generate         


        

Answer 1

To use the Google Kubernetes Engine API from a GCE virtual machine you need to add the cloud platform scope ("https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform") to your VM when it is created.