AWS Cloud Organizations

AWS Organizations is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage. AWS Organizations helps you simplify billing and cost allocation, apply policies across your accounts, and enable unified security and compliance across your AWS environment.

1. Consolidated Billing:

   • With AWS Organizations, you can consolidate the billing and payment for multiple AWS accounts. This makes it easier to track and manage costs across the organization.
   • It allows you to take advantage of volume pricing discounts based on the aggregated usage of all accounts in the organization.

2. Organizational Units (OUs):

   • OUs are containers for organizing and managing AWS accounts within an organization. You can create OUs to reflect your organization's structure and hierarchy.
   • OUs provide a way to apply policies to specific sets of accounts.

3. Service Control Policies (SCPs):

   • SCPs are policies that help you set fine-grained permissions for what actions members of an organization can perform across their accounts.
   • SCPs allow you to control access to AWS services and resources at the root level, OUs, or individual accounts.

4. Consolidated Logging:

   • AWS Organizations enables you to aggregate CloudTrail logs from all accounts in your organization into a single S3 bucket. This simplifies log analysis and auditing across your AWS environment.

5. Cross-Account Access:

   • AWS Organizations supports cross-account access, allowing you to grant permissions to users or roles in one account to access resources in another account.
   • Cross-account access is often used for scenarios like sharing resources, accessing consolidated billing information, or enabling centralized security management.

6. Automated Account Creation:

   • You can use AWS Organizations to automate the creation of new accounts based on predefined templates. This helps in ensuring consistency and compliance across newly created accounts.

7. Delegated Administration:

   • AWS Organizations allows you to delegate administrative responsibilities for specific OUs to other AWS accounts. This helps in distributed management of resources.

8. Tag Policies:

   • Tag policies enable you to define and enforce tagging conventions across your organization. This helps in organizing resources and managing costs.

9. Security and Compliance:

   • AWS Organizations provides a framework for implementing security and compliance policies across your AWS environment. SCPs, tagging policies, and consolidated logging contribute to a unified security posture.

10. Audit Trail:

    • AWS Organizations provides an audit trail that logs changes to the organization's structure, policies, and member accounts. This helps in tracking and understanding changes over time.

11. Integration with Other AWS Services:

    • AWS Organizations integrates with various AWS services, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM).