Advantages of AWS Multi-Account Architecture

When we begin doing some things in AWS, we usually start with a single AWS account and create our AWS resources in it. And things can become a mess very fast. This article should give you an overview why you should switch to a using multi-account architecture very soon for workloads on AWS.

Hard limits per AWS Account

AWS has many “hard limits” per AWS Account, which means that - in contrast to soft limits - they cannot be increased. Having multiple AWS Accounts reduces the probability of hitting one of them. There are a few things annoying then having a failing deployment because you hit e.g. the maximum number of EC2 instances per account while rotating autoscaling-groups.

“Blast radius” reduction

One of the most important reasons for separating workloads into several distinct AWS accounts is to limit the so called blast radius. It means to contain issues, problems or leaks by design so that only one portion of the infrastructure is affected when things go wrong and to prevent them from leaking / cascading into other accounts.

AWS accounts are logically separated: No AWS account or resource in it can access resources of other AWS accounts by default. Cross-account access is possible, but it has always to be granted in an explicit way, e.g. by granting permissions through IAM or other mechanism specific to an AWS service.

AWS Per-Account Service and API limits

AWS throttles API access on an per-account basis: So for example imagine some script of Team A is e.g. hammering the EC2 API could result in another Team B’s production deployment to fail, if they are in the same AWS account. Finding the cause could be hard or even impossible for Team B. They might even see themselves forced to add retries/backoff to their deployment scripts which further increases load and even more throttling! And last but not least, it adds accidental complexity to their software.

Additionally there are also service and resource limits per AWS account. Some of them can be raised, some can’t. the probability of running into one of these limits declines if you distribute your AWS resources across several AWS Accounts.

Security

Maybe you remember the startup Code Spaces which had all their resources in one AWS account including backup: they got hacked and entirely vaporized within 12 hours.
I would argue that this scenario would have happened less likely if their backups resided in another AWS account.

Environment separation

Typed in DROP DATABASE into the wrong shell? Oops, production is gone! That’s actually common story, you might as well remember this GitHub outage (not directly related to AWS, but similar contributing factors).

Consider separating e.g. test, staging and production environments into own AWS accounts to reduce the blast radius.

IAM is complicated

IAM is not very easy to grasp and even today there seems to be no easy way to follow the Principle of Least Privilege in IAM, I’d say that Managed Policies are a good start, but too often I see myself falling back to assign AdministratorAccess. So we often tend to give away too many permissions to e.g. IAM roles or IAM users.

By separating workloads into their own AWS Accounts, we once again reduce the blast radius of too broad permissions to one AWS account - by design.

Map AWS Accounts to your organizational structure

Companies usually try to break down the organization into smaller autonomous subsystems. A subsystem could be an organizational unit/team or a product/project team. Thus, providing each subsystem their AWS account seems to be natural. It allows teams to make autonomous decisions within their AWS account and reduce communication overhead across subsystem borders as well as dependencies on other subsystems.

The folks from scout24 though issued a warning on mapping AWS accounts 1:1 to teams:

The actual sizing and assignment of accounts is not strictly regulated. We started creating accounts for teams but quickly found out that assigning accounts per product or group of related services makes more sense. Teams are changing members and missions but products are stable until being discontinued. Also products can be clearly related to business units. Therefore we introduced the rule of thumb: 1 business unit == 1 + n accounts. It allows to clearly identify each account with one business unit and gives users freedom to organize resources at will.

I can definitely fully sign that statement as I have seen it many times that teams are splitting and merging or are constantly getting reorganized. This is especially true in companies who think they are agile and try to fix deeper systemic problems by constantly reorganizing people and teams, ignorant of Conway’s Law or their technical constraints / heritage.

Exploring your company’s Bounded Contexts might be another method to find the right sizing and slicing.

Never slice AWS accounts by teams or org units - but rather by Bounded Context, product, purpose or capability.

Making implicit resource sharing harder by design

I guess almost everyone can tell a story of one big database in the middle, and tons of applications sharing it (Database Integration).

Sam Newman brings it to the point in “Building Microservices”:

Remember when we talked about the core principles behind good microservices? Strong cohesion and loose coupling — with database integration, we lose both things. Database integration makes it easy for services to share data, but does nothing about sharing behavior. Our internal representation is exposed over the wire to our consumers, and it can be very difficult to avoid making breaking changes, which inevitably leads to a fear of any change at all. Avoid at (nearly) all costs.

The probably best way to get out of this situation is to never get into it. So how did we get in this situation in the first place? I guess usually because humans go the path of least resistance. So the usual way goes like that: Change security group settings and connect directly to the database (in the same VPC and AWS Account). And BOOM: it became a shared resource and so it became a broken window.

I’d argue with separate AWS Accounts it’s harder to build an entangled mess. In the described case one would e.g. need to connect e.g. two VPCs from the different AWS accounts first. People might think twice if there is another way of accessing the data source in the other AWS account. E.g. by exposing it via an API. And even when they go for the VPC peering, they at least have to make that EXPLICIT on BOTH sides. It’s no drive-by change anymore.

Ownership and billing

Another advantage is the clarity of ownership when using multiple accounts. This can be enormously important in organizations which are in the transition from a classical dedicated ops team to a “[You built it, you run it.](You built it, you run it.)” model: If let’s say a dev team spawns a resource into their AWS account, it’s their resource. It’s their database, it’s their whatever. No throw-over-the-wall. They can move fast, they don’t have to mess around with or wait for other teams, but they are also more directly connected to the consequences of their actions. On the other hand, they also can do changes with less fear of breaking things in other contexts because of unknown side effects (remember the entangled database from above?).

It also makes billing really simple since costs are transparently mapped to the particular AWS accounts (Consolidated Billing), so you get a detailed bill per e.g. business function, environment or whatever you defined as dimensions for your AWS accounts. Again, a direct feedback loop. In contrast, think of a big messy AWS account with one huge bill. That might simply reinforce the still prevailing believe in many enterprises that IT is just a cost centre.

Side note: Yes you could also use Cost Allocation Tags for making ownership and costs transparent, but tagging has some limitations:

  1. Tagging is not consistent across AWS services and resources: Some support tags, some don’t.
  2. You need to force people to use tagging and/or build systems that check for correct tags etc. This process has to be maintained (e.g. initialized, communicated, trained, enforced, re-communicated, reinforced, and so on).

Right from the beginning

When I created my first corporate AWS account back in 2010, neither I nor my colleagues weren’t aware of all the multi-account advantages mentioned here. This was one contributing factor resulting in one big shared AWS account across teams. And believe me: “We’ll split up the account later, when we have more time / are earning money / are more people” is usually not going to happen! So please don’t make the same mistake! Create more AWS accounts!

My current favorite is to slice AWS accounts in two dimensions:

  • Dimension one: Business function/capability/product/project/Bounded Context (not teams/departments, see above!)
  • Dimension two: Environment (e.g.test, staging, prod)

This sounds like a lot of initial complexity, but I think it’s really worth it in the long term for the mentioned reasons.

Creating AWS Accounts is free and:

It’s getting easier with AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations does not only simplify the creation of new AWS accounts (it has been a pain in the ass before!), it also helps to govern who can do what: You can structure the AWS accounts you own into an organizational tree and apply policies to specific sub-trees. For example, you could deny the use of a particular service org-wide, for an organizational unit or a single account.

Outlook

In one of my next articles, I am going to bring some light into the drawbacks of having many AWS accounts, but also how to mitigate these drawbacks with automated account provisioning and governance, so stay tuned!

Thanks

I want to thank Deniz Adrian for reviewing this article and adding additional points about implicit resource sharing and fearless actions.

References

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