AWS Account Structure Strategies

This post was originally published on the Stax blog.

Organisations typically need a multi-account strategy to support the requirements of running their AWS ecosystem. It’s important to set up the accounts in a consistent fashion at the start, to ensure simple management and tracking of many AWS accounts in the future. This post provides an overview and recommendations for organisations structuring their AWS accounts.

After you have rushed out and created that first AWS account (to gain an understanding of AWS and play with Lambda!), it’s important to take some time and decide how many AWS accounts are needed and for what purpose they will be used. AWS account strategies need to be tuned to an organisation and fit with its current and future needs.

Before examining the possible strategies, let’s remind ourselves: an AWS account is the complete logical grouping of resources on AWS. Effectively, each account is an independent customer on the AWS platform. The AWS account is the first thing you create to access AWS capabilities. From there you can build and deploy virtual resources on AWS, whether a single EC2 instance or 10,000.

When deciding on your account structure, it’s good to first consider a few factors. As companies scale, if they’re lucky, they’ll create a Cloud Centre of Excellence to make the big decisions about the organization’s account strategy and tagging strategy.

But if you’re just starting out, it’s good to chat with your development teams about what they think their needs are before you get too far down one road or another. If you end up with too much in a single account, it can be hard to work out who ‘owns’ what. But if you have too many accounts, things can get a bit fast and loose and that can be even harder to manage.

To learn how to choose an enterprise AWS account structure strategy, head to the full Stax blog post.