AWS Organizations

Concept

AWS Organizations lets you manage many AWS accounts from one place — one combined bill, one set of rules. The account everything is run from is called the management account, and the rest are member accounts. Accounts can be arranged into groups called organizational units (OUs). With a service control policy (SCP), you can decide which actions can never be done in a group’s accounts. The costs of all accounts come on one bill, which is called consolidated billing.

Simple example

A company with many branches — each branch keeps its own accounts, but the head office sets everyone’s rules and pays one combined bill.

Why it’s needed

In a big company, keeping separate accounts for each team or project is safer, but managing them one by one is hard.

Where it’s used

Separate accounts for development, test and production; rules across all accounts such as “this Region cannot be used”.

Azure equivalent

Azure Management Groups

Remember

Organizations = the head office of your accounts.

Learn more

For details and the latest information, see the official documentation:

• AWS Organizations — AWS official documentation ↗