AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) is a service that allows you to share AWS resources across multiple accounts and within your own organization. This service enables you to create resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon Aurora databases within a single account and share them with other accounts in the same organization or with external accounts.

RAM provides a centralized way to manage and control access to resources across multiple accounts, without requiring resource duplication or manual sharing of credentials. This helps to reduce costs, simplify resource management, and improve security by providing fine-grained control over resource access.

With RAM, you can easily create resource shares, which are collections of resources that you want to share with one or more accounts. You can specify the permissions for each resource share, defining who can access the shared resources and what actions they can perform.

RAM also provides a resource share invitation system, allowing you to invite other accounts to join your resource shares. You can accept or reject invitations, and you can revoke access to your resources at any time.

Overall, AWS Resource Access Manager is a useful tool for organizations that need to collaborate and share resources across multiple accounts. It simplifies the process of resource sharing, reduces costs, and improves security by providing a centralized way to manage access to resources.

Introduction

AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) is a service that allows you to share AWS resources across multiple accounts and within your own accounts. It simplifies resource sharing by allowing you to share resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon RDS databases with other AWS accounts without having to create duplicate resources or share your AWS account credentials.

Benefits of using AWS RAM

Using AWS RAM offers several benefits, including:

  1. Resource sharing: AWS RAM allows you to share resources across multiple accounts, making it easier to collaborate with other teams, departments, or organizations. Resource sharing can help reduce costs, improve efficiency, and enable faster innovation.
  2. Improved security: With AWS RAM, you can share resources without sharing your AWS account credentials. This helps to improve security by reducing the risk of unauthorized access or misuse of resources.
  3. Simplified resource management: AWS RAM simplifies resource management by allowing you to share resources with other accounts without having to create duplicate resources or manage multiple sets of credentials.
  4. Enhanced control and visibility: AWS RAM provides enhanced control and visibility over shared resources. You can define resource sharing permissions, monitor resource usage, and revoke resource access at any time.

Overall, AWS RAM is a powerful tool that can help you collaborate more effectively with other teams and organizations, while also improving security and simplifying resource management.

AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) is a service that enables resource sharing across AWS accounts and regions. With AWS RAM, you can share AWS resources like Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon Aurora databases, and Amazon RDS DB instances, among others, with specified AWS accounts or AWS Organizations.

The following are some of the key features of AWS RAM:

  1. Resource sharing across accounts and regions: AWS RAM allows you to share resources across multiple AWS accounts and regions. You can share resources like VPCs, subnets, security groups, and route tables with other AWS accounts, making it easier to collaborate and share resources across different teams or organizations.
  2. Resource grouping: AWS RAM allows you to group resources together based on your business needs, making it easier to manage and share resources. You can create resource shares that include multiple resources such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and S3 buckets.
  3. Resource permissions management: AWS RAM enables you to manage resource permissions and access control across different AWS accounts. You can define resource share policies that specify which AWS accounts can access shared resources and what level of access they have. You can also view resource share permissions and usage across your organization using the AWS RAM console.

Use Cases

Sharing resources between AWS accounts

Sharing resources between AWS accounts can be useful in scenarios where multiple teams or departments need access to the same resources, but require distinct billing and access controls. By sharing resources between AWS accounts, you can maintain separation of concerns while still benefiting from resource reuse and centralized management. Some examples of resources that can be shared between AWS accounts include Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon RDS databases.

Sharing resources between AWS regions

Sharing resources between AWS regions can be useful in scenarios where you need to replicate data or services across multiple geographic locations for better performance, fault tolerance, or compliance. By sharing resources between AWS regions, you can reduce the latency of accessing your resources from different parts of the world, as well as ensure that your data is resilient to disasters or outages. Some examples of resources that can be shared between AWS regions include Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon RDS read replicas, and Amazon CloudFront distributions.

Sharing resources with AWS Organizations

Sharing resources with AWS Organizations can be useful in scenarios where you need to manage multiple AWS accounts as a single entity, and enforce consistent policies and controls across them. AWS Organizations allows you to create and organize accounts into hierarchies, apply policies to groups of accounts, and automate account provisioning and management. By sharing resources with AWS Organizations, you can reduce the administrative burden of managing multiple AWS accounts separately, as well as ensure that your resources are compliant with your organization’s standards and regulations.

Sharing resources with AWS Service Catalog

Sharing resources with AWS Service Catalog can be useful in scenarios where you need to provide a self-service portal for users to access pre-approved AWS resources, such as EC2 instances or RDS databases. AWS Service Catalog allows you to create and manage catalogs of AWS resources that are compliant with your organization’s policies, and expose them to your users through a customizable portal. By sharing resources with AWS Service Catalog, you can reduce the time and effort required to provision and manage AWS resources, as well as ensure that your users are using resources that are approved and supported.

Here are the steps on how to use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM):

Creating a resource share

  1. Log in to your AWS Management Console.
  2. Navigate to the AWS RAM console.
  3. Click on “Create a resource share”.
  4. Select the type of resource you want to share (e.g., an Amazon VPC, a subnet, or a security group).
  5. Choose the AWS account IDs or AWS Organizations accounts you want to share the resource with.
  6. Set the permissions for the shared resource.
  7. Click “Create resource share”.

Editing a resource share

  1. Log in to your AWS Management Console.
  2. Navigate to the AWS RAM console.
  3. Select the resource share you want to edit.
  4. Click on “Edit resource share”.
  5. Modify the resource share as needed (e.g., add or remove accounts, change permissions).
  6. Click “Update resource share”.

Accepting a resource share

  1. Log in to your AWS Management Console.
  2. Navigate to the AWS RAM console.
  3. Click on “Received resource shares”.
  4. Select the resource share you want to accept.
  5. Click “Accept resource share”.
  6. Choose the permissions you want to accept.
  7. Click “Accept resource share”.

Viewing and deleting resource shares

  1. Log in to your AWS Management Console.
  2. Navigate to the AWS RAM console.
  3. To view all of your resource shares, click on “Resource shares”.
  4. To view received resource shares, click on “Received resource shares”.
  5. To delete a resource share, select the share you want to delete and click “Delete resource share”. Note that deleting a resource share will remove the shared resource from all accounts that it was shared with.

Conclusion:
In summary, AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) provides a powerful tool for managing resource sharing across multiple AWS accounts. With AWS RAM, you can easily share resources such as Amazon VPCs, Amazon Subnets, and Amazon Route 53 Resolver rules with other accounts in a secure manner. Additionally, AWS RAM allows you to manage resource sharing permissions, monitor resource usage, and enforce security policies.

As for future developments and improvements for AWS RAM, we can expect to see ongoing enhancements to the service. AWS may introduce additional resource types that can be shared using RAM, as well as new features for managing resource sharing across accounts. We may also see improvements to the user interface and overall user experience, making it easier to configure and manage resource sharing. Overall, AWS RAM is an essential tool for organizations that need to share resources across multiple accounts and is likely to continue to evolve to meet the needs of its users.