AWS Organizations

A service that manages multiple AWS accounts together.

A service for centrally managing multiple AWS accounts. Provides organizational units, SCPs, and consolidated billing.

• Separating production and development accounts
• Consolidated billing
• Usage restrictions with SCPs

• Used to manage multiple accounts
• Provides consolidated billing
• SCPs cap the maximum permissions of accounts

• Separate accounts by workload
• Understand SCPs as permission ceilings, not grants
• Understand the relationship with Control Tower

AWS Organizations is a service for centrally managing multiple AWS accounts as a single organization. Under the organization, organizational units (OUs) can be created, with member accounts placed beneath them. Organizing accounts in a hierarchical structure makes it easier to manage them by purpose (production, staging, sandbox), department, or project. Major features include the programmatic creation of new AWS accounts, the use of Service Control Policies (SCPs) to enforce upper-bound access permissions across the entire organization or specific OUs, consolidated billing that aggregates the bills of all member accounts under the management account, and centralized deployment and aggregation of services such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, Security Hub, and GuardDuty across the entire organization. A typical use case is serving as the foundation for a multi-account strategy used by enterprises and individual developers who operate multiple accounts. For example, production workloads and development or testing workloads can be separated into different accounts, with SCPs structurally preventing access from the development account to production resources. From a pricing perspective, Organizations itself is available at no additional cost, and consolidated billing allows Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and free tier benefits to be shared and optimized across the entire organization, which simplifies cost management in multi-account operations.

• What is AWS Organizations (AWS Official Documentation)
• AWS Organizations (AWS Official)

Last updated: 2026-06-01