Appendix A: Relation to AWS Well-Architected

AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Based on six pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability — AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures, and implement designs that can scale over time.

The best practices for organizing your AWS environment addressed in this guide augment and support the best practices represented in the following sections of the Well-Architected pillars.

Operational Excellence Pillar

• Organization - Operating Model – Use of multiple AWS accounts and OUs enable you to support multiple operating models within a common overall AWS environment.

• Prepare – Mitigate Deployment Risks – Use of separate AWS accounts for deployment-oriented operations help secure those operations and isolate them from the targeted test and production workload environments.

Security Pillar

• Security Foundations - AWS Account Management and Separation – Use of separate accounts for your test and production workloads helps maintain isolation between those environments.

• Identity and Access Management – Identity Management – Use of a centralized identity provider and federated access helps you more efficiently manage human access across your accounts.

• Identity and Access Management – Permissions Management – You can define permission guardrails for your AWS environment and provide least privilege access to identities that need access to your accounts.

• Configure service and application logging (SEC04-BP01) – Your security operations team can benefit from the centralization of logs generated across your accounts in support of analysis and detection requirements.

Reliability Pillar

• Foundations - Manage Service Quotas and Constraints – By isolating workloads in their own accounts, you can more easily manage service quotas for those workloads.

Cost Optimization Pillar

• Practice Cloud Financial Management – Cost-Aware Processes – You should build in cost awareness from the start of your cloud adoption journey.

• Expenditure and Usage Awareness – Governance – Your account structure can help you isolate different workloads for fiscal and billing purposes.

• Expenditure and Usage Awareness – Monitor Cost and Usage – Since costs are allocated by default at the account level, you can distinguish costs across accounts.