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Managing and Governing Large Organizations
A series on the annoyances of account migration and management
Ross Wickman
May 05, 2023
Happy belated Star Wars Day. This is Unlimited Leave, the AWS Management and Governance newsletter that thinks the only thing cuter than Baby Yoda is their own children.
I almost sent the newsletter a day early just because Star Wars Day is also one of my children’s birthdays.
May the 4th be with you!
This week's topics
Managing and Governing Large Organizations (Series)
Announcements picked up this last week
Greenfield AWS Organization Course Update
Managing and Governing Large Organizations (Series)
I’ve learned a lot over the last 6 months deploying 4 new AWS Organizations and preparing for the migration of over 100 accounts across multiple other Organizations into one of these 4 new Organizations.
Over the next few weeks, I will be documenting some of the hangups and annoyances of this process as well as some tools that could potentially help mitigate some of the issues.
Historical Billing and CUR
The first big annoyance I have run into is with Billing data. If configured in the management account, the Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is not directly available to the child accounts in an Organization. When child accounts are created in an Organization, the “Consolidated Billing” aspect of the Organization rolls all billing information up to the Management account by default.
In the individual accounts, you can use Cost Explorer and in the Billing Console have your historical spending information. No problem. Opt to have the account leave the organization and ALL of the historical billing information is gone.
You can request through an AWS Support ticket the backfill of CUR data for an account, so long as the account has access to the CUR bucket where the data was placed, or if the account has been a member of the organization the entire time.
There are some oversimplified details I’m skipping over at the moment, but this information is enough for me to consider also creating a CUR and a billing bucket in each account to keep a copy of all billing data to travel with every account no matter where it goes. The dilemma with the CUR in the management account is the billing data is mixed in with all other accounts in the organization. Getting or giving access to such information could be risky. On the flip side, this problem only potentially impacts recipients of an account that is leaving an organization to be standalone or join a new organization.
If this could be you at any point, I implore you to consider generating a CUR in all accounts where historical billing data may be of importance to you.
While I’m not 100% positive at this time that this is the only or even the best solution, I don’t see much of a negative aside from paying for the S3 storage.
I have a meeting in the coming week with an AWS specialist for billing as well as a TAM to hash out the path forward and will report back.
Announcement(s)
Security
A bigger deal than immediately assumed
Greenfield Course Updates
I've just wrapped up the module for the creation and implementation of a new AWS account. If I’m being honest (which no one should ever have to preface) it’s pretty boring. I know everyone on this list is totally capable of clicking through some screens and filling out a billing information form. I hope I included enough commentary and pointers to keep you engaged.
If you haven’t already and you’re interested in seeing just how entertaining creating a new AWS account can be, there are only 2 weeks left to purchase the course for under $200.
Even with everything going on in life, I’m still on track to release the course on my birthday, Friday, June 30th, in that morning’s issue of Unlimited Leave.
Your continued support is amazing.
As a reminder, over the next few weeks leading to the launch, the pre-sale price of the course is going to increase by $10 each week. As we get closer to launch, $20 per week. Until the launch of the course at $299.
March 31st - $99
April 7th. - $99
April 14th - $99
April 21st - $109
April 28th - $119
May 5th - $129
Learn more here:
