AWS Organizations is a service that allows you to centrally manage multiple AWS accounts. It simplifies the management of your AWS resources across multiple accounts and enables you to apply policies, such as service control policies, to enforce rules across your entire organization.

With AWS Organizations, you can consolidate billing and set up cost allocation across all the accounts in your organization. This makes it easier to manage your AWS costs and optimize your spending.

Additionally, AWS Organizations enables you to use AWS Control Tower to automate the setup of new accounts and apply guardrails to ensure compliance with your organization’s policies.

Overall, AWS Organizations is a powerful tool for managing your AWS resources at scale and provides the necessary features to help you maintain a secure and compliant environment.

Introduction:

AWS Organizations is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables you to manage and govern multiple AWS accounts centrally. AWS Organizations is designed to simplify management of your AWS resources across multiple accounts and to help you to achieve your governance and compliance goals. With AWS Organizations, you can create and manage AWS accounts and apply governance policies across those accounts.

Features of AWS Organizations:

AWS Organizations provides several key features that help you to manage multiple AWS accounts from a single location. Some of the key features of AWS Organizations include:

  1. Centralized billing: AWS Organizations allows you to consolidate billing across all your AWS accounts. This simplifies your billing process and provides you with a single bill for all your AWS usage.
  2. Account management: AWS Organizations provides a simple interface that you can use to create and manage AWS accounts from a single location.
  3. Resource sharing: With AWS Organizations, you can share resources across multiple AWS accounts. This enables you to manage your AWS resources more effectively and to improve the efficiency of your organization.
  4. Policy management: AWS Organizations allows you to apply governance policies across multiple AWS accounts. This ensures that your AWS resources are used in a compliant and secure manner.

Benefits of using AWS Organizations:

  1. Simplified management: AWS Organizations simplifies management of your AWS resources across multiple accounts. This reduces the time and effort required to manage your AWS resources and helps you to achieve your governance and compliance goals.
  2. Centralized billing: AWS Organizations provides a centralized billing solution that simplifies your billing process and provides you with a single bill for all your AWS usage.
  3. Improved security: AWS Organizations enables you to apply governance policies across multiple AWS accounts. This ensures that your AWS resources are used in a compliant and secure manner.
  4. Improved efficiency: AWS Organizations enables you to share resources across multiple AWS accounts. This improves the efficiency of your organization and reduces the overall cost of managing your AWS resources.

Creating an AWS Organization

An AWS Organization is a collection of AWS accounts that are centrally managed using AWS Organizations. By creating an AWS Organization, you can manage and govern multiple AWS accounts as a single entity, automate account creation and management, and apply policies across your accounts.

Steps to create an AWS Organization

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console as an IAM user with the necessary permissions to create an organization.
  2. Open the AWS Organizations console.
  3. Choose Create organization.
  4. Choose the type of organization you want to create: Consolidated billing or All features. Consolidated billing is recommended if you want to manage billing and cost allocation for multiple accounts. All features is recommended if you want to manage accounts and resources across multiple accounts.
  5. Follow the prompts to create your organization.
  6. Once you create an organization, you can add accounts to it and define policies to govern those accounts.

Best practices for creating an AWS Organization

  • Use separate accounts for different environments such as development, testing, and production. This helps to isolate resources and minimize the impact of issues in one environment on others.
  • Define policies to enforce security and compliance standards across your accounts.
  • Use AWS Organizations to consolidate billing and cost management for multiple accounts.
  • Use AWS CloudTrail to monitor activity across your organization.
  • Use AWS Config to monitor compliance with your policies.

Different types of accounts that can be added to the organization

  • Master account: The account that creates the organization.
  • Member account: An account that is part of the organization.
  • AWS Service account: An account created by an AWS service such as AWS Support.
  • Root account: The account that is created when you sign up for AWS. It has unrestricted access to all resources in the account.
  • IAM user account: An account created for a specific user in an organization.

Managing Accounts in an AWS Organization:

An AWS Organization is a collection of AWS accounts that are centrally managed using AWS Organizations service. AWS Organizations help you to simplify the management of accounts and apply policies across the accounts. Here’s an overview of how to manage accounts in an AWS organization:

  1. How to manage and view accounts in the organization:
    • You can view and manage all the accounts in your organization from the AWS Organizations console.
    • The console displays a list of all the accounts in your organization, along with their email addresses, account IDs, and status.
    • You can also view the details of each account by clicking on the account name.
  2. How to organize accounts using organizational units (OUs):
    • Organizational units (OUs) are a way to group AWS accounts within your organization.
    • You can create OUs to reflect your organization’s hierarchy and the way you want to manage your accounts.
    • You can move accounts into OUs, and apply policies to the OU to affect all the accounts within the OU.
  3. How to apply service control policies (SCPs) to OUs:
    • Service control policies (SCPs) are a way to manage permissions and access to AWS services across your organization.
    • SCPs are applied at the OU level and affect all the accounts within the OU.
    • You can create SCPs to allow or deny access to specific AWS services, actions, or resources.
    • SCPs can also be used to enforce compliance requirements, such as access controls or data protection policies.

Managing Policies in an AWS Organization

Managing policies in an AWS Organization is an essential task for ensuring that your organization’s resources and data are secure and compliant with your organization’s policies. AWS provides several tools and services that enable you to manage policies effectively in an AWS Organization, including Service Control Policies (SCPs).

Explanation of SCPs and their use cases

SCPs are a type of policy that you can use to manage permissions and access control for AWS services across an entire organization or specific organizational units (OUs) within the organization. SCPs allow you to set restrictions on the AWS services and actions that can be performed by users, roles, and groups within the organization. SCPs are particularly useful in scenarios where you need to enforce compliance requirements, such as data privacy or security regulations, across multiple accounts in an AWS Organization.

How to create and attach SCPs to OUs

To create and attach an SCP to an OU in an AWS Organization, follow these steps:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the AWS Organizations console.
  2. In the left navigation pane, choose Policies, and then choose Service control policies.
  3. Choose Create policy.
  4. In the Create policy dialog box, enter a policy name and description, and then define the policy statement using the JSON syntax.
  5. Choose Create policy to create the SCP.
  6. To attach an SCP to an OU, navigate to the Organizational units tab, select the OU to which you want to attach the SCP, and then choose Attach policy.

Best practices for managing policies in an AWS Organization

Here are some best practices for managing policies in an AWS Organization:

  1. Use SCPs to enforce compliance and security policies across your organization.
  2. Define policies at the OU level to create a hierarchical structure that aligns with your organization’s business units, departments, or teams.
  3. Use the AWS Organizations policy simulator to test and validate policy changes before you apply them to your organization.
  4. Use AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail to monitor and audit policy changes and ensure compliance with your organization’s policies.
  5. Regularly review and update your policies to ensure they align with your organization’s changing business needs and compliance requirements.

Conclusion

In summary, AWS Organizations is an excellent tool for managing multiple AWS accounts from a single location. The benefits of using AWS Organizations include streamlined billing and cost management, simplified account management, and improved security and compliance. By consolidating multiple accounts under a single organization, you can reduce the administrative burden and gain better control over your AWS resources.

In conclusion, it is highly recommended that organizations take advantage of AWS Organizations to improve their overall AWS experience. With the proper setup and configuration, AWS Organizations can help organizations save time and money while providing a more secure and efficient environment for their AWS resources. As your organization grows and expands, AWS Organizations can help you keep track of your AWS accounts and resources, providing you with the scalability and flexibility needed to adapt to changing business needs.