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AWS Multi-Account
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AWS

What is AWS Multi-Account?

AWS multi-account architecture is a strategy of using multiple AWS accounts to isolate workloads, enforce security boundaries, and implement governance at scale using AWS Organizations.

Why Use Multiple AWS Accounts

A single AWS account creates a blast radius problem—a misconfiguration or security breach in one workload can affect everything. Multi-account architecture uses AWS Organizations to create separate accounts for different purposes: production, staging, security, logging, and shared services.

Common Account Structure

  • Management account — houses AWS Organizations, billing, and SSO
  • Security account — centralized security tooling, GuardDuty, and audit logs
  • Log archive account — immutable storage for CloudTrail and VPC flow logs
  • Network account — Transit Gateway, shared VPCs, and DNS management
  • Workload accounts — separate accounts per environment (dev, staging, prod) or per team

Benefits

  • Blast radius isolation — failures and breaches are contained within a single account
  • Granular billing — track costs per team, project, or environment
  • Least privilege — IAM boundaries enforced at the account level
  • Compliance — easier to meet SOC 2 and other frameworks with clear separation of concerns

Implementation with Terraform

Tools like Atmos and Terraform make multi-account architecture manageable by defining account baselines as reusable components. Service Control Policies (SCPs) enforce guardrails across the organization, and AWS SSO provides centralized access management.

Related Terms

TerraformSOC 2 ComplianceCloud Native

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