AWS Organization Simply Explained (Part 1)
Imagine you’re a dad, with really young kids, your major priority is to ensure your kids are watching what they should at their age, you can decide what they can access, and their watch time and they can all log in through the same password, that’s simply how AWS Organization works.
One typical thing about using the AWS console is that one is most likely to have more than one account, even while using it for personal use, how much more as a company.
I have had several AWS accounts for my online courses, and internships, and what have you? So at a company level, companies often have different AWS accounts for different levels, from testing, staging, development, and production levels.
With these in mind, knowing the different login credentials to all these accounts can be pretty confusing and tiring, if not frustrating. This is where AWS Organizations come in.
AWS Organizations is a free service in the AWS console, that helps you centrally manage multiple AWS accounts. It is an excellent tool for businesses or individuals with lots of AWS accounts.
My aim here is to briefly discuss how AWS Organization works, and why you should take advantage of it.
BENEFITS
AWS Organizations offers lots of benefits and I will try to put them together into units and discuss briefly each:
Central management
With AWS Organization you can consolidate multiple accounts into a single organization
You can easily create AWS accounts or use already existing accounts, you can create, update and delete information for accounts in your organization, and assign roles and security policies as well. This can allow users under an Organization to meet security requirements and have rights to what to do and what not to do.
Manage Billing
Individuals or organizations can track, manage, plan costs, and pay their AWS bills via one central point. This is another beautiful feature, no need to use your payment medium to pay for accumulated bills differently on all your accounts, you can pay for all the accounts with ease in one place. You can see how much each account accumulated separately and pay per account if you wish.
Single sign-on
As discussed before now, having several accounts and recalling all login credentials can be tiring, with AWS Organization, all one needs is one login credential to the root account and from there you can access other accounts with a click. Easy right? I told you.
Resource sharing
Accounts within the same AWS Organization can easily share central resources, applications, and even services with them via the AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM). Note that not all resources are sharable on the console, Feel free to learn more about the sharable resources here.
CONCLUSION
Simply put, AWS Organizations help make multiple accounts management fun and easy, you can monitor, manage and control your numerous accounts via a central account called the root. In a later article, I will discuss the easy steps toward creating an AWS organization. For now, I hope I have been able to give you a layman’s explanation of how it works. Do you think I missed anything? Or do you need more clarity? Fortunately, you can reach me via the comment section, so feel free.
The default maximum number of accounts allowed in an AWS organization is 10 accounts. If you need more, you can request an increase using the Service Quotas console. An invitation sent to an account counts against this quota.
