HACKER Q&A
📣 MadsRC

How many AWS accounts does your organisation have?


I was recently in a discussion with what I consider like-minded individuals. The conversation happened upon AWS accounts and how one should structure it (besides running it in an AWS Organisation... that is a no-brainer).

One side of the discussion meant that one should limit the amount of AWS accounts one had, due to the risk of account sprawl.

The other side meant that one should not impose such a restriction, as AWS accounts come with no cost and tools exists for managing them.

Now, I am convinced that one should use AWS accounts to house individual workloads if possible. There are of course exceptions to this, but overall I think it's the right way to do it. With the soft limitations AWS puts in place on the number of VPCs and such, I get the feeling that AWS feels the same way. They also seem to mention something about using accounts as security barriers in their best practices.

I'm also convinced that plenty of organisations deal with hundreds, if not thousands of AWS accounts on a daily basis without too much issue. Now, I have no data to back this up, hence why I submitted this.

Could people, in rough estimates, answer this simple questions: How many AWS accounts does your organisation have?

50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 1000+?

I've been in organisations with ~500 and in organisations with ~50.


  👤 mishftw Accepted Answer ✓
My org (250-500 employees -- most in manufacturing) has 5 AWS accounts.

We have dev/staging/prod and then a master account used for organization management & consolidated billing. Just stood one up today for another department too.

I implemented SSO recently and am exploring the idea of giving each developer (we have a small team) their own lab account to standup whatever they need. Right now we have folks sometimes overwriting work in the dev account.

When I joined we had 3 accounts (staging/prod/payer) but slowly as we build real DevOps process its sorting itself out.

The rational for having different accounts across different departments - it helps with billing and ensuring the correct department pays for their share of AWS usage. Also better access control with Single Sign On & added benefit of reducing spillover effects from improper access/actions.


👤 tedmiston
You can easily manage sub-accounts, say per environment or whatever, with AWS Organizations these days.

https://aws.amazon.com/organizations/

I don't know why anyone would need hundreds or thousands of AWS accounts though...