AWS Organizations is a service that helps you centrally manage and govern multiple AWS accounts as a single entity. With AWS Organizations, you can consolidate billing and cost management, apply policies and security controls across accounts, and simplify resource management.
Here are the key features of AWS Organizations:
Consolidated billing: With AWS Organizations, you can consolidate billing and payment for multiple AWS accounts, making it easier to manage costs and allocate resources.
Service control policies (SCPs): SCPs are a feature of AWS Organizations that allow you to define policies that control what AWS services and features can be used in each account. SCPs can be used to set mandatory compliance policies, block access to certain services, or limit resources available to each account.
Account management: AWS Organizations allows you to create, manage, and remove AWS accounts in a hierarchical structure, making it easy to manage large numbers of accounts.
Cross-account access: With AWS Organizations, you can grant cross-account access to resources, allowing you to share resources across accounts, without the need to create multiple IAM users.
Compliance and security: AWS Organizations provides a framework for implementing compliance and security policies across multiple AWS accounts, making it easier to maintain consistency and control.
Here’s an example of how AWS Organizations can be used to manage multiple AWS accounts and implement service control policies:
Let’s say you have a company with multiple departments, each with their own AWS account. You want to ensure that each department is responsible for their own costs and has control over their own resources, while also enforcing certain policies and restrictions across all accounts.
Using AWS Organizations, you can create a master account and invite each department’s account to join the organization. You can then use SCPs to define policies that apply to all accounts, such as limiting access to certain services or enforcing security controls.
Each department can still manage their own account, but the policies and restrictions set by the organization will apply to all accounts. This allows you to enforce consistent policies and controls across all accounts, while still giving each department autonomy over their own resources.
In summary, AWS Organizations is a powerful tool for managing multiple AWS accounts and implementing policies and controls across them. It provides a centralized management console for all your accounts and allows you to apply policies and restrictions across them, making it easier to maintain consistency and control.