AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations

In this tutorial, we are going to explore about the AWS Organizations and how to manage multiple AWS accounts from a single point using AWS Organizations. AWS Organizations is a service that helps you centrally manage and govern multiple AWS accounts within a single organization. It simplifies account management, enhances security through centralized policies, and allows for better cost control and visibility across the organization.

As companies scale and expand, the need for efficient management and control over their digital infrastructure becomes increasingly important. This creates a need for isolation between different departments or business units within the organization. For that, companies create multiple AWS accounts, providing departments with dedicated environments to manage their resources independently. This solves the problem of isolated environments but poses the challenge of managing multiple AWS accounts. To make this management easier, AWS provides us with a management service called AWS Organizations.

Lets explore about what AWS Organizations is, what it’s components are, and how it works.

What is AWS Organizations?

AWS Organizations is an account management service that we can use to manage multiple accounts under one roof. It allows us to group multiple accounts and Organizational Units (OUs) under one root account and then centrally manage all of them using the root account.

This helps manage accounts more easily by consolidating billing and allowing us to use a savings plan across all accounts. We can also share common resources within these OUs.

Key Components of AWS Organizations

1. Organization Root

• The root account contains all other accounts within the organization
• The highest-level container in AWS Organizations, serving as the starting point for all accounts within an organization.
• By default, when you create an AWS organization, a root entity is created, which can then contain organizational units (OUs) and member accounts.

2. Organizational Units (OUs)

• OUs are a way to group accounts together for administrative purposes. We can create OUs to organize our accounts hierarchically based on our organization’s structure, such as by department, project, or environment (e.g., production, development, staging etc).
• OUs allow you to apply Service Control Policies (SCPs) to multiple accounts at once, simplifying policy management.

3. AWS Accounts

• Each AWS account is an independent entity with its own resources and settings, but within AWS Organizations, you can manage these accounts centrally.
• Accounts can be member accounts or the management account. The management account has administrative control over the organization and is responsible for creating the organization.

4. Service Control Policies (SCPs)

• SCPs are policies that define the maximum available permissions for member accounts within an OU or the entire organization.
• SCPs are a key feature of AWS Organizations that enable us to set permissions at the organization level. They help enforce compliance and security policies by restricting access to certain AWS services or actions.
• SCPs allow or deny specific AWS actions, but they do not grant permissions directly. Instead, they act as a permission boundary, overriding account-level IAM policies as needed.

5. Consolidated Billing

• AWS Organizations enables consolidated billing, allowing you to pay for all member accounts under a single billing account (the management account).
• With consolidated billing, you can track costs by account and use volume discounts across the organization for services like S3 and EC2.

Benefits of AWS Organizations

1. Centralized Account Management:
   • You can manage all AWS accounts in your organization from a central location, making it easier to add or remove accounts, and enforce organization-wide policies.
2. Improved Security and Compliance:
   • By using SCPs, you can enforce security standards and restrict specific actions or services across accounts. This is essential for maintaining compliance within regulated environments.
3. Cost Management and Optimization:
   • Consolidated billing allows you to see costs across accounts in one place, simplifying budget management and enabling you to apply volume discounts across accounts.
4. Environment Isolation:
   • OUs make it easy to separate production and development environments or set up different accounts for different business units, allowing for environment-specific policy management.

Examples of AWS Organizations in Action

1. Setting up OUs for Environment Isolation:
   • Suppose you have a multi-environment setup (e.g., Production, Development, Testing). By creating OUs for each environment, you can apply stricter SCPs to the Production OU, such as limiting who can delete critical resources, while keeping more flexible permissions in Development and Testing.
2. Using SCPs to Restrict Costly Services:
   • You can create an SCP that denies access to high-cost services, like Amazon SageMaker or certain high-performance EC2 instance types, in the Development OU to control costs.
3. Cross-Account Access and Resource Sharing:
   • AWS Organizations allows secure sharing of resources like VPCs, subnets, and RDS databases across accounts, simplifying the architecture and avoiding redundant resource duplication.

Key Best Practices

1. Use SCPs Thoughtfully:
   • SCPs are powerful tools for controlling access to AWS services and resources. Use them to enforce security and compliance standards across our organization. However, be cautious not to overly restrict access, which could impede innovation and productivity.
2. Separate Production and Development Environments:
   • Place production and non-production accounts in different OUs, with stricter controls on production to prevent accidental resource modification or deletion.
3. Enable MFA for the Management Account:
   • Since the management account has broad permissions across the organization, enforce multi-factor authentication for extra security.
4. Regularly Review Policies and Billing:
   • Conduct regular reviews of SCPs to ensure they align with your organization’s needs and review billing reports to identify cost optimization opportunities.
5. Establish a clear organizational structure
   • Design a logical hierarchy of OUs and accounts that reflects our company’s structure and business needs. This will help streamline management and enforce policies more effectively.
6. Implement least privilege
   • Follow the principle of least privilege when assigning permissions to accounts and users within our organization. Only grant access to the resources and services necessary for individuals to perform their roles effectively.

By following these best practices, organizations can effectively leverage AWS Organizations to manage and govern their AWS environment securely, efficiently, and in alignment with business objectives.

AWS Organizations Use Cases

• Startups and Growing Businesses: AWS Organizations can simplify cloud account management as the business grows, ensuring scalability with minimal administrative overhead.
• Enterprise Environments: Large companies with multiple departments, business units, or subsidiaries can use AWS Organizations to centralize governance, security, and cost management.
• Regulated Industries: Organizations with strict compliance needs (e.g., healthcare, finance) can leverage SCPs and account-level policies to ensure each account meets compliance standards.

Service Control Policies

SCPs act as guardrails to control what actions and services are allowed or denied across all accounts within the organization. The structure of SCPs is the same as the IAM policy. SCPs can be attached to OUs or individual AWS accounts within an AWS Organizations hierarchy.

• When an SCP is attached to an OU, it affects all AWS accounts within that OU and any child OUs. However, SCPs are not applied retroactively; they only affect future actions and resources created within the affected accounts and OUs.
• SCPs are applied hierarchically across an organization’s OUs and accounts. When an SCP is attached to a parent OU, it automatically applies to all child OUs and accounts unless explicitly overridden. This inheritance model allows organizations to establish baseline security controls while granting flexibility for more specific controls at lower levels of the hierarchy.
• SCPs are evaluated during access control decisions made by AWS services. When a request is made to perform an action within an AWS account, AWS evaluates the applicable SCPs along with other identity-based policies to determine whether the action is allowed or denied. SCPs take precedence over identity-based policies, meaning that even if an identity has explicit permissions granted through IAM policies, those permissions can be further restricted by SCPs.

How AWS Organizations work?

AWS Organizations operates by establishing a hierarchy of accounts within an organization and applying policies and controls at various levels to govern the behavior and actions of those accounts. At the core of AWS Organizations is a service control plane that manages the enforcement of policies across the organization’s accounts.

When an AWS account is created and added to an organization, it becomes a member account within that organization. The member account inherits the policies and controls defined at higher levels of the organizational hierarchy, such as organizational units (OUs) or the root of the organization.

AWS Organizations uses a distributed architecture to propagate policies and controls across accounts within the organization. Policies, such as service control policies (SCPs) and tagging policies, are stored centrally and distributed to member accounts as needed. This allows for centralized management and enforcement of policies while ensuring low-latency access to resources within individual accounts.

Example: Managing multiple accounts

Consider the scenario where the following accounts:

• Four accounts for developers
• Two account for testing
• An admin account
• A management account

These are multiple accounts with different set of actions. Managing them individually will be quite difficult. So to ease the management, we’ll create an organization. A better structure for our organization would be as follows:

We’ll create an organization using the management account. We’ll create OUs for each of these domains with appropriate SCPs attached with them. After that we’ll invite these accounts and add them within their appropriate OU. The hierarchy of our organization in this case will look as follows:

By adding these accounts under our organization, we’ll now easily be able to streamline management, enforce standardized policies, and centralize billing and resource usage tracking for these accounts.

AWS Organizations provides a scalable and secure way to manage multiple AWS accounts, ensuring streamlined governance, security, and cost control across the organization. With centralized management and powerful tools like SCPs and OUs, AWS Organizations is essential for large-scale AWS users.

That’s all about the AWS Organizations. If you have any queries or feedback, please write us at contact@waytoeasylearn.com. Enjoy learning, Enjoy AWS Tutorials.!!