AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: AWS Organizations

Automatically update alternate contacts for newly created AWS Accounts

Customers use the cloud to move faster and build differentiated products and services. AWS lets you experiment, innovate, and scale more quickly, all while providing a flexible and secure cloud environment. Furthermore, a multi-account AWS environment lets you build and deploy workloads quickly, while providing mechanisms to do so in a secure, scalable, and resilient […]

Fail fast but safely – how Old Mutual is using Developer Sandboxes for real digital innovation

This is a guest post co-authored with Kershnee Ballack and Wilkister Wechuli from Old Mutual Limited Old Mutual Limited (OML) is a pan-African financial services group that offers financial solutions to retail and corporate customers across 14 African countries. Its purpose is to help customers thrive by enabling them to achieve their lifetime financial goals, […]

Codify your best practices using service control policies: Part 2

I introduced the fundamental concepts of service control policies (SCPs) in the previous post. We discussed what SCPs are, why you should create SCPs, the two approaches you can use to implement SCPs, and how to iterate and improve SCPs as your workload and business needs change. In this post, I will discuss how you […]

Codify your best practices using service control policies: Part 1

Each AWS account enables cellular design – it provides a natural isolation of AWS resources, security, partitions access, and establishes billing boundaries. Separation of concern through multi-account setup is a key design principle that customers use to experiment, innovate, and scale quickly on AWS. The basis of a multi-account AWS environment is AWS Organizations, which […]

Cross-account configuration with AWS AppConfig

Customers will often start using various AWS services through a single AWS account. As customers continue their AWS journey, they increase the number and diversity of workloads operating on AWS. Furthermore, as the number of users grows, managing this account becomes difficult and time consuming. Then, customers create more accounts for multiple users. This helps […]

Maintain compliance using Service Control Policies and ensure they are always applied

Many of our customers manage multiple AWS accounts in AWS Organizations and utilize Service Control Policies (SCPs) to centrally manage permissions in their organization. SCPs offer central control over the maximum available permissions for every account in your organization and can be applied to an account, organization units (OUs), or the organization as a whole […]

Organizing your AWS Control Tower landing zone with nested OUs

AWS Control Tower provides the easiest way for you to set up and govern your AWS environment, or landing zone, following prescriptive AWS best practices managed on your behalf. AWS Control Tower orchestrates multiple AWS services (AWS Organizations, AWS CloudFormation StackSets, Amazon S3, AWS Single Sign-On, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail) to build a landing zone […]

Manage AWS account alternate contacts with Terraform

Managing AWS billing, support and service team notifications, and potential security events are critical for customers to ensure security, cost optimization and operational monitoring for their AWS deployments. Alternate contacts allow us to contact another person about issues with your account at the right time, even if you’re unavailable. AWS will send you operational notifications such […]

Root and Nested Organizational Unit Support for Customizations for AWS Control Tower

Customers often use AWS accounts as a boundary to segregate their workloads, environments, business units, compliance requirements, or any type of logical isolation that suits their business. An AWS account serves as a hard boundary by design – each account is its own logical entity with controls, limits, and guardrails. Large customers typically have many […]

Managing configuration compliance across your organization with AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup

When running your applications on AWS, the number of resources you use increases as the demand of your applications keeps growing. Eventually, keeping track of your AWS resources and the relationships between them becomes challenging from a governance perspective. AWS Config lets you more easily assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. […]