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Have lots of AWS accounts

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Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#101
post #31
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear more about why you think that's the case! Maybe the next blog post?

The killer feature of AWS is that they've broken almost nothing since first launching over 15 years ago. Their commitment to keeping old stuff working is truly amazing. No other cloud hosting service comes close, because no other cloud service has had 15 years to prove themselves in the same way!

SimpleDB is still running!

Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#102
post #10

> My favorite way to create a network between all my services hosted in different AWS accounts is to share a VPC from a network account into all my service accounts and use security groups to authorize service-to-service communication. There’s no per-byte tax, zonal architectures are easy to reason about, and security groups work just like you expect. That's gold advice. I wish AWS RAM supported more services (like A…

Why can't the CLI generate the config if I can see all the accounts and roles in the SSO start page? That's a desperately needed feature.

I would love to see a browser extension for SSO account tabs if AWS can't solve it natively.

Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#103
post #21

I love this approach, although I'm yet to work anywhere that does this. I guess the million (thousand?) dollar questios now become where do you draw the boundary across accounts? Presumably there are many bad ways to slice accounts up. And what happens when accounts do need to communicate? I can imagine three major scenarios for cross account permissions: * Cross account iam policies (painful in my experience) * Addi…

> Would love to hear the author's view. Instead you can hear AWS's view, which is to have one account per stage per region per service. I can't find a source but I work for Amazon and this is what was recommended to us by ProServe (the contracting branch of AWS) when we talked with them. I think it's idiotic though (because regions are 100% separated within an account, and it would easily triple the number of account…

There are global quotas per account that can sneak up on you if you have too many services running in the same account albeit in different regions. DynamoDB total read and write capacity comes to mind.

Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#104
post #10

> My favorite way to create a network between all my services hosted in different AWS accounts is to share a VPC from a network account into all my service accounts and use security groups to authorize service-to-service communication. There’s no per-byte tax, zonal architectures are easy to reason about, and security groups work just like you expect. That's gold advice. I wish AWS RAM supported more services (like A…

> My current solution is to share my ~/aws/config with everyone so we all have the same profile names and scripts can work for everyone.

If you're on Mac/Linux you could have everyone use direnv. Add a .envrc file in each git repo (or your script's subdirectory) with `export AWS_PROFILE=profilename`. Now everyone is working with the same profile names without having to pass around config files.

Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#105
Define “lots.” Because the default limit in AWS is 10 accounts per org.

Quota increases can be requested but the default limit tells us what AWS thinks normal usage should be for most use cases.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o...

Perhaps the author meant “more than one”?

Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#106
post #81

Multiple AWS accounts makes life a living nightmare. We have 38 AWS accounts and it is incredibly difficult to maintain each one of them. IAM and even worse cross account IAM is horrible to author and maintain! Keeping track of resource limits and billing sucks. When using SSO, which we do, you cannot have more than one account open in the same browser at the same time. Use GCP instead, segregate your infra by projec…

Curious / product research: Are your 38 accounts all in the same organization? Do you have any human IAM users left or is it all IdP, all the time? Do you use Terraform or anything like it? Also, yes, a pox on the single-player AWS Console. I’ve at least found a way to logout from one account and login to another in the same motion but it’s still a poor experience.

Yeah all accounts are in the same OU. We do have human IAM users but those are "legacy". Nowadays Okta has been the preferred method of accessing AWS console and CLI. We do use terraform but that is also fragmented since each team has the freedom to innovate in their own way. People use CDK, SAM, CloudFormation, Terraform etc. This fracturing of IaC techniques has been a natural consequence of having too many silos aka. accounts and has made it hard to enforce consistency. I think having 2 or 3 accounts is probably ok for a small to medium size org. We are 96 humans so far.

Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#107
post #81

Multiple AWS accounts makes life a living nightmare. We have 38 AWS accounts and it is incredibly difficult to maintain each one of them. IAM and even worse cross account IAM is horrible to author and maintain! Keeping track of resource limits and billing sucks. When using SSO, which we do, you cannot have more than one account open in the same browser at the same time. Use GCP instead, segregate your infra by projec…

You don't need to sso in each and every account, you can just have a user in the main org (or at any point in the org tree that is most appropriate) and assume the role within the account you want to manage.

We use Okta and put ppl in groups so I'm not sure if that would work.

Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#108
post #81

Multiple AWS accounts makes life a living nightmare. We have 38 AWS accounts and it is incredibly difficult to maintain each one of them. IAM and even worse cross account IAM is horrible to author and maintain! Keeping track of resource limits and billing sucks. When using SSO, which we do, you cannot have more than one account open in the same browser at the same time. Use GCP instead, segregate your infra by projec…

> When using SSO, which we do, you cannot have more than one account open in the same browser at the same time.

http://willthames.github.io/2018/02/28/managing-multiple-aws...

You're welcome :)

Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#109
post #3

One of the things I love most about google cloud is that "projects" are easy to create and easy to link to other projects. Roles and service accounts can even reference across projects, though I'm not sure I'd recommend doing that. No more faffing about with special accounts, passwords and difficult to configure shared VPCs, it all becomes so easy. Even managing the different accounts is difficult without browser ext…

I don't know. I've found it to be pretty difficult to answer the question "which of these 1000 gcp projects are running a production workload and which are random one offs created by a dev messing around or by a google sheet script?"

Re: Have lots of AWS accounts

#110

Define “lots.” Because the default limit in AWS is 10 accounts per org. Quota increases can be requested but the default limit tells us what AWS thinks normal usage should be for most use cases. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o... Perhaps the author meant “more than one”?

> Quota increases can be requested but the default limit tells us what AWS thinks normal usage should be for most use cases.

This is certainly not true for a lot of AWS quotas. If you hit an ec2 quota for an instance type, that isn't AWS telling you that you are using too much compute. Its there as a speedbump to make sure you have some idea that you know what you are doing and to make sure AWS can actually service your requests.

AWS will happily let you have hundreds of child accounts. In fact, if you are talking to them about your architecture they will even encourage it (assuming that it is actually appropriate for the scale of your organization).

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