Organizing Your AWS Environment Using Multiple Accounts

Publication date: July 26, 2022 (Document history)

Abstract

Businesses that are starting to adopt AWS, expanding their footprint on AWS, or planning to enhance an established AWS environment need to ensure they have a foundation on AWS for their cloud. environment. One important aspect of their foundation is organizing their AWS environment following a multi-account strategy.

Using multiple AWS accounts to help isolate and manage your business applications and data can help you optimize across most of the AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars, including operational excellence, security, reliability, and cost optimization. This paper provides best practices and current recommendations for organizing your overall AWS environment. The extent to which you use these best practices depends on your stage of the cloud adoption journey and specific business needs.

Are you Well-Architected?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of the decisions you make when building systems in the cloud. The six pillars of the Framework allow you to learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems. Using the AWS Well-Architected Tool, available at no charge in the AWS Management Console, you can review your workloads against these best practices by answering a set of questions for each pillar.

For more expert guidance and best practices for your cloud architecture—reference architecture deployments, diagrams, and whitepapers—refer to the AWS Architecture Center.