04-AWS SAA-C03 Exam Guide

SAURABH SHARMA
2 min readJan 6, 2024

AWS Organisation and Control Tower

AWS Organisation

  • AWS Organisations allow you to consolidate multiple AWS Accounts into an organisation you create and manage centrally.
  • Available in two feature sets:
    — Consolidate Billing
    — All features
  • Including root accounts and organisation units
  • Policies are applied to root accounts or OUs
  • Consolidate billing includes:
    — Paying Account: Independent and can’t access resources of other accounts.
    — Linked Accounts: all link accounts are independent

Consolidate Billing

  • Single payment method for all the AWS accounts in the organisation
  • Combined view of charges incurred by all your account
  • Pricing benefits from aggregated usage
  • Limit of 20 linked accounts for consolidated billing (default)
  • Can help cost control through volume discounts.
  • Unused reserved EC2 instances are applied across the group
  • The paying account should be used for billing purposes only

Service Control Policies

  • Manage the maximum available permissions
  • Must have all features enabled in the Organisation
  • Can be applied to accounts or OUs
  • Policies can be assigned at different points in the hierarchy
  • SCPs only affect IAM users and roles — not resource policies
  • SCPs affect the root account in the member account
  • SCPs don’t affect any action performed by the management account.
  • Deny list strategy:
    — Usage the FullAWSAccess SCP
    — Attached to every OU and account
    — Overrides the implicit deny
    — Explicitly allows all permissions to flow down from the root
    — Create additional SCPs to explicitly deny permission
  • Allow list strategy:
    — FullAWSAccess SCP is removed
    — No APIs are permitted anywhere unless you explicitly allow them
    — Create SCPs to allow permissions
    — SCPs must be attached to the target account and every OU above it including root

AWS Organisation — Migration

  • Accounts can be migrated between organisations
  • You must have root or IAM access to both the member and management accounts
  • User AWS Organisation console for just a few accounts
  • Use the AWS Organisation API or AWS CLIif there are many accounts to migrate

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SAURABH SHARMA

Technology Enthusiast and Open Source Technology advocate