What is AWS organization used for?

AWS Organizations is a service that allows customers to centrally manage and govern groups of AWS accounts, as well as the processes and policies that apply to them. Accounts in several AWS organizations can also share resources, security methods, audit requirements, customizations, and policies.

In this blog, we will cover everything you need to know about AWS Organization:

What is AWS Organizations?

AWS Organizations is AWS’s administrative border between accounts. The AWS master account is the account under which an AWS Organization is formed. Other accounts are created from a master account and are known as linked accounts after being added to the organization. As a result, an organization can have a single master account and several linked accounts. A linked account cannot be associated with more than one Organization.

An Organization may be further subdivided into Organization Units (OU), which serve as a container for numerous AWS accounts, such as Production or Development. OUs can be associated with a set of policies known as Service Govern Policies (SCP), which can control access to services located in various accounts. Organizations make it possible to have:

• Accounts’ billing is consolidated.
• IAM user database that is shared
• Policy-based service control

As an organization’s administrator, you may establish and terminate AWS accounts as well as invite existing accounts to join the organization. It also provides a more flexible hierarchical structure for your AWS accounts and resource groups in the form of organizational units (OUs). AWS Organizations is a worldwide service with a single endpoint that is accessible from all AWS Regions. You are not required to choose a region.

Read: AWS Free Tier: Create Account (Learn AWS)

Components and AWS Hierarchy

It is vital to comprehend what components and what architecture it gives for your accounts and groups if you want to fully grasp what it is capable of. An AWS organization’s hierarchy is illustrated simply in the example below.

1. Management account – The management account is in charge of paying all fees incurred by the member accounts as well as having the duties of a payer account. This AWS account is the one you utilize to set up your organization. You may do the following operations from the management account for the organization:

• Create and terminate accounts in the organization.
• Manage invites and invite other current AWS accounts to your organization.
• Remove accounts from the organization.
• Apply policies to entities in your organization (roots, OUs, or accounts).
• Integrate with other AWS services that are supported.

Read: AWS For Testers And AWS Quality Assurance

2. Member Account(s) – The remaining accounts in an organization are all of these AWS accounts. Only one organization may have a member account at any given time. To apply controls specifically to that account, you can attach a policy to it.

• Directly adding a new AWS account to the company is possible.
• AWS accounts that already exist can be invited or added to the organization.

3. Organizational Unit (OU) – 

• An organization’s AWS accounts are grouped together as organizational units.
• An OU can also contain other OUs enabling you to create a hierarchy. This enables them to reflect the company’s structure.
• One account cannot be added under two different OUs.

4. Service Control Policy (SCP) –

• The Service Control Policy (SCP) is a document that lists the policies that should be applied to all OUs, all individual AWS accounts, or the whole organization.
• The services and tasks that users or roles can carry out are specified by the policy.
• In an organization, hierarchical relationships pass down policies.

Read: AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Exam

Understanding AWS Organization Details

Terms Used by AWS Organizations

Which features and benefits does the AWS Organizations Service Provide?

AWS Organizations has two feature sets available:

• Consolidated Billing – This subset of functionality, which offers fundamental billing administration tools, is supported by all organizations.
• All features – This feature set, which includes Consolidating Billing features, is the ideal approach to work with AWS Organizations. When you form an organization, the default setting is to enable all functionalities.

1. Consolidated Billing

This AWS Organizations feature allows you to aggregate billing and payment for numerous AWS accounts. Every organization in AWS Organizations has a management account that pays all of the member accounts’ costs.

Benefits of Consolidated Billing –

• Single bill – You will receive a single bill for several accounts.
• Simple tracking – Track expenses across various accounts and obtain the total cost and use statistics.
• Combined usage – You may aggregate consumption across all accounts in the organization to enjoy volume pricing discounts, Reserved Instance discounts, and Savings Plans.

An AWS Organization can be updated at any time to use all capabilities, but each member account must authorise the change.

Read: AWS Architecture: End to End Design and Working

2. All Features of AWS Organizations

If all features are enabled in your organization, you may use AWS Organizations to leverage powerful central governance and administration capabilities.

AWS Organizations provides the following capabilities:

• Managing numerous AWS accounts: You may organise accounts, apply policies to those groups, and set limits that specify the resources, services, and policies that each group may use.
• Control permissions and access: Apply rules based on teams, business units, and projects to all users.
• Share your resources: You can distribute that service to many customers both within and outside of the same AWS organization.
• Free of charge usage: This feature is completely free to use. Only the AWS services and resources used by the accounts are charged.

Service Control Policy (SCP)

This policy type specifies which services and activities are available to users (or roles) for certain accounts. SCPs do not provide permissions; instead, they operate as a filter. This implies that certain IAM rights must already be accessible for the accounts, users, and roles.

Read: Create Access And Secret Keys In AWS

Benefits of AWS Organizations

1. Permission administration that is both quick and precise: AWS accounts can be assigned to individuals, teams, workloads, or products. Separate accounts can create customised settings and meet the varying security requirements of each team.
2. Apply logical limits to all areas of policies: Different initiatives within the business may be subject to varying levels of security and compliance. For example, by isolating AWS resources across various AWS accounts, you may simply apply separate identification regulations in accordance with the appropriate legal frameworks.
3. Damage should be contained inside logically segregated user accounts: Only the resources associated with that AWS Organizations’ user account will be exposed to the increased risk if a specific user account is hacked.
4. Billing is simple to manage: Using numerous accounts makes it easier to distribute AWS charges. You may use them to determine which projects or services are liable for AWS fees.

Use Cases of AWS Organizations

1. Automate the establishment of AWS accounts and aggregate workloads: You can segregate development and production accounts into distinct groups.
2. Implement and uphold rules for audits and compliance: SCPs may be used to guarantee that users in your accounts only do actions that are compliant with your security rules.
3. Granting access and tools for your security: Create a Security OU with AWS Organizations to grant them read-only access to all of your resources.
4. Cross-account sharing of shared resources: You may easily share important core resources across all of your accounts with the help of AWS Organizations. You may, for instance, distribute your main Microsoft Active Directory managed by AWS Directory Service. You might also share IT services hosted in specific locations using the AWS Service Catalog. Additionally, you may use AWS Resource Access Manager to guarantee that application resources are shared throughout your company.

Pricing for AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations is a free feature of your AWS account. As a result, every feature detailed in this Blog is essentially free, and you may use it on any scale with as many accounts as your business requires.

Which one should you use: AWS Organizations or AWS IAM?

The functions of AWS Organizations and AWS IAM are distinct. Even though they appear to be identical, they are made with different objectives in mind.

1. AWS IAM –

• IAM users are an excellent approach to controlling employee access. They allow you to authenticate employees on a “sub-account” with restricted access. This permissions management solution is essential for limiting employee access to AWS resources. Service accounts are also authenticated using IAM users. For example, if you have the AWS CLI running on an EC2 instance and wish to grant it permission to administer an S3 bucket, you may do so using an IAM user rather than leaving your root account credentials on a distant server.
• IAM policies are used for AWS accounts to grant or prohibit access to AWS services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, as well as particular AWS resources (like chosen S3 buckets) or API actions (like S3) to build buckets.
• Service accounts are authenticated using IAM roles. If you’re running the AWS CLI on an Amazon EC2 instance and want to allow it to administer an Amazon S3 bucket, you may utilise an IAM role to avoid leaving your credentials on the remote server.

2. AWS Organizations –

• AWS Organizations operate in a similar manner. It allows you to create true, distinct sub-accounts from the primary account, complete with their own rights, all while preserving central billing and management. You might think this is a terrific method to provide employees access, but Organizations aren’t designed for that.
• The primary issue is that you’re only allowed four accounts by default. While you can seek an increase, the restriction is in place for a reason—all of your Organization accounts are completely different. This implies that if a developer was working on a DynamoDB table under their own account, it would be invisible to the rest of the team.

Which one to choose?

• Use AWS Organizations to divide your infrastructure into development and production accounts.
• You may also want to set up two more environments: testing, which contains clean dummy data and is used by the QE team to run automated builds, and staging, which is a complete mirror of production used to catch any bugs that may arise when using public APIs and real data before they affect customers.
• Create numerous IAM users in the development environment to provide controlled access to your staff.
• Repeat the procedure for your QE team during testing and for your project managers and solution architects during staging. Production should only be changed by highly authorised persons and, of course, contain the IAM service accounts required for effective operation.

Read: AWS System Manager

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. How does the AWS organization function?
Ans. AWS Organizations achieve high availability by duplicating data across many servers in AWS data centres within their Region. If a request to alter any data is successful, the change is committed and safely saved. However, the modification must then be propagated across all servers.

Q2. Can an AWS account belong to two organizations?
Ans. AWS Organizations enables managing many AWS accounts from a single master account simple. Organizations allow you to organize your accounts into organizational units and manage them by application, environment, team, or any other grouping that makes sense for your business.

Q3. How many OUs can an AWS organization create?
Ans. No, an AWS account may only belong to one OU at a time.

Q4. Is it possible to have two OUs with the same name?
Ans. Multiple OUs can be created inside a single organization, as well as OUs within other OUs. Each OU can have several accounts, and accounts can be moved from one OU to another. However, OU names must be distinct inside a parent or root OU.

Related Links/References

• AWS Free Tier Limits
• AWS Free Tier Account Details
• How to create a free tier account in AWS
• AWS Free Tier Account Services
• Cloud Computing Service Models: SaaS | PaaS | IaaS
• AWS Shared Responsibility Model
• Azure DevOps Vs AWS DevOps – Difference & Pricing Overview
• AWS Networking Fundamentals – A Brief Introduction for Beginners

Next Task For You

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