AWS accounts are natural boundaries for permission, security, costs, and workloads. Using a multi-account environment is a recommended best-practice when scaling your cloud environment. You can simplify account creation by programmatically creating new accounts using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), SDKs, or APIs, and centrally provision recommended resources and permissions to those accounts with AWS CloudFormation StackSets.
As you create new accounts, you can group them into organizational units (OUs), or groups of accounts that serve a single application or service. Apply tag polices to classify or track resources in your organization, and provide attribute-based access control for users or applications. In addition, you can delegate responsibility for supported AWS services to accounts so users can manage them on behalf of your organization.
You can centrally provide tools and access for your security team to manage security needs on behalf of the organization. For example, you can provide read-only security access across accounts, detect and mitigate threats with Amazon GuardDuty, review unintended access to resources with IAM Access Analyzer, and secure sensitive data with Amazon Macie.
Set up AWS IAM Identity Center to provide access to AWS accounts and resources using your preferred identity source, and customize permissions based on separate job roles. You can use service control policies (SCPs) to centrally enforce consistent access controls on principals across accounts in your organization. You can also use resource control policies (RCPs) to centrally enforce consistent access controls on resources across accounts in your organization. Additionally, you can use Chatbot policy to control access to your organization's accounts from chat applications such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.
You can share AWS resources within your organization using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM). For example, you can create your AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) subnets once and share them across your organization. You can also centrally agree to software licenses with AWS License Manager, and share a catalog of IT services and custom products across accounts with AWS Service Catalog.
You can apply declarative policies to enforce durable intent such as baseline configuration for an AWS service across your organization. Once you attach a declarative policy, the configuration is maintained when new features, APIs are added and enforced regardless of authorization context.
You can activate AWS CloudTrail across accounts, which creates a log of all activity in your cloud environment that cannot be turned off or modified by member accounts. In addition, you can set policies to enforce backups on your specified cadence with AWS Backup, or define recommended configuration settings for resources across accounts and AWS Regions with AWS Config.
Organizations provides you with a single consolidated bill. In addition, you can view usage from resources across accounts and track costs using AWS Cost Explorer, and optimize your usage of compute resources using AWS Compute Optimizer.