AWS Cookbook

Chapter 9. Account Management

9.0 Introduction

While the previous chapters have focused on deploying and configuring resources inside your AWS account, we want to provide some recipes that show examples of what you can do at the whole account level.

As you continue to scale your AWS usage, you will find it useful to have tools and services available to ease the burden of management, especially if you start to add additional AWS accounts to your environment. We are seeing more and more people choose to use AWS accounts as “containers” for their specific applications. Some companies provide individual accounts for production and nonproduction workloads to business units within a company; some even set up “shared services” accounts to provide internal services to business units within a company to share common resources across the many accounts they may be managing. Your AWS account spans Regions to give you global capabilities, as shown in Figure 9-1.

Figure 9-1. AWS account perspective

We like to think of the tools and services that AWS provides as building blocks that you can use to customize your cloud environment to meet your specific needs. Some of these can be used at an account level to give you more management capabilities over your environments as you scale (i.e., adding additional team members or adding additional AWS accounts). You can organize and consolidate billing ...