AWS Organizations
As companies grow and scale, the management and governance of disparate AWS accounts can be a challenge. That's where AWS Organizations can help. Organizations helps you centrally manage and govern your environment as you grow and scale your AWS resources. It helps you manage policies for groups of accounts and automate account creation.
Core Benefits​
AWS Organizations provides several benefits designed to streamline management and enhance governance across your AWS environment:
- Scalability: Quickly scale your environment by programmatically creating new AWS accounts for resources and teams.
- Simplified Permissions: Simplify permission management through Service Control Policies (SCPs), allowing you to define maximum permissions for accounts or OUs.
- Cost Management: Manage and optimize costs across your AWS accounts and resources with consolidated billing and cost allocation tools.
Use Cases​
AWS Organizations is versatile and can be applied to various scenarios to improve operational efficiency and security:
- Automating AWS Account Creation: Programmatically provision new AWS accounts for different projects, teams, or environments.
- Security Team Access and Tools: Provide security teams with necessary tools and access to manage security policies and monitor compliance across the organization.
- Controlled User Access: Control user access to designated AWS services, ensuring adherence to compliance requirements and security best practices.
- Resource Sharing: Share common resources and services (like Amazon VPCs, Transit Gateways, or AWS Resource Access Manager) across accounts within the organization.
Key Concepts of Organizations​
An organization is a collection of AWS accounts that you can manage centrally and organize into a hierarchical, tree-like structure with a root at the top and organizational units (OUs) nested under the root. Each account can be located directly in the root or placed in one of the OUs in the hierarchy.
To learn more about how AWS Organizations works, here are the key concepts:
- Organization Structure:
AWS Organizations is used to consolidate and manage multiple AWS accounts within a central location. When you create an organization, it automatically creates a root, which is the parent container for all the accounts in your organization. - Management Account:
The management account is the central AWS account that creates and manages the organization. It's responsible for overall control and governance, including consolidated billing and managing SCPs. - Organizational Unit (OU):
An organizational unit (OU) is a logical grouping of accounts within an AWS Organization. OUs can contain member accounts or other nested OUs, allowing for hierarchical management and policy application. - Service Control Policies (SCP):
An SCP is a policy that lets you place restrictions on the AWS services, resources, and individual API actions that users and roles in each account can access. SCPs can be applied to either OUs or individual member accounts, providing a powerful governance mechanism. - Member Account (not in an OU):
If you have a member account that has unique requirements that do not overlap with those of an organizational unit, you can add them to the organization without placing them under an OU. This account can still take advantage of benefits such as consolidated billing.
In designing your organization, you should consider the business, security, and regulatory needs of each department. You use this information to decide which departments group together in OUs.
AWS Organizations provides a robust framework for managing complex multi-account AWS environments, offering tools for central governance, security, and cost optimization that are critical for scaling operations effectively.
Use case: Ideal for enterprises, startups, or any organization managing multiple AWS accounts, aiming to enforce policies, automate account provisioning, and gain central visibility and control over their cloud resources.