Recommended OUs and accounts - Organizing Your AWS Environment Using Multiple Accounts

Recommended OUs and accounts

This section provides details on the recommended OUs and, when applicable, a set of recommended AWS accounts.


      This image shows the recommended OUs and accounts.

Recommended OUs

Depending on your requirements, you might not need to establish all the recommended OUs. As you adopt AWS and learn more about your needs, you can expand the overall set of OUs. Refer to the Patterns for organizing your AWS accounts for examples of how you might begin to organize your AWS accounts.

While the provided OU recommendations are geared towards common use cases, it is your organization's responsibility to define a customized OU structure that aligns with your distinct requirements relevant to isolation and automation.

The recommended OUs consist of:

The Security OU and the Infrastructure OU are categorized as foundational OUs. Foundational OUs are defined as OUs that contain accounts, workloads, and other AWS resources that provide common security and infrastructure capabilities to secure and support your overall AWS environment.

Accounts, workloads, and data residing in the foundational OUs are typically owned by your centralized Cloud Platform or Cloud Engineering teams made up of cross-functional representatives from your Security, Infrastructure, and Operations teams.

The majority of your accounts are contained in the other OUs. These OUs are intended to contain your business-related workloads. They also contain tools and services that support the entire lifecycle of your business-related services and data.