AWS Organizations: A Comprehensive Overview

AWS Organizations is an account management service that enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage. This service is designed to meet the budgetary, security, and compliance needs of your business.

Centralized Management of AWS Accounts

One of the key features of AWS Organizations is the centralized management of all your AWS accounts. You can combine your existing accounts into an organization, enabling you to manage the accounts centrally. You can create accounts that automatically become a part of your organization, and you can invite other accounts to join your organization. You also have the ability to attach policies that affect some or all of your accounts.

Consolidated Billing

Consolidated billing is another feature of AWS Organizations. You can use the management account of your organization to consolidate and pay for all member accounts. In consolidated billing, management accounts can also access the billing information, account information, and account activity of member accounts in their organization. This information may be used for services such as Cost Explorer, which can help management accounts improve their organization’s cost performance.

Hierarchical Grouping of Accounts

AWS Organizations allows you to group your accounts into organizational units (OUs) and attach different access policies to each OU. For example, if you have accounts that must access only the AWS services that meet certain regulatory requirements, you can put those accounts into one OU. You then can attach a policy to that OU that blocks access to services that do not meet those regulatory requirements. You can nest OUs within other OUs to a depth of five levels, providing flexibility in how you structure your account groups.

Policies for Centralized Control

As an administrator of the management account of an organization, you can use service control policies (SCPs) to specify the maximum permissions for member accounts in the organization. In SCPs, you can restrict which AWS services, resources, and individual API actions the users and roles in each member account can access. You can also define conditions for when to restrict access to AWS services, resources, and API actions. These restrictions even override the administrators of member accounts in the organization.

In conclusion, AWS Organizations is a powerful tool for businesses that use multiple AWS accounts. It provides centralized management, consolidated billing, hierarchical grouping of accounts, and policies for centralized control, making it easier to manage and monitor your AWS resources. Whether you’re a small business with a few AWS accounts or a large enterprise with hundreds, AWS Organizations can simplify your account management and help you maintain control over your AWS environment.