Consolidated Billing

  Amazon Web Services (AWS), Billing and Organization

https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/learn/v4/t/lecture/3814706?start=0

What is AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations is an account management service that enabled you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage.

Available in 2 feature sets

  • Consolidated Billing
  • All Features

OU = Organizational Unit

Consolidated Billing

  • The paying account is independent and cannot access the resources of the other accounts.
  • All linked accounts are independent
  • Currently, there is a limit of 20 linked accounts for consolidated billing.
    • More can be added – contact AWS to do so.

Billing Alerts

  • When monitoring is enabled on the paying account, the billing data for all linked accounts is included.
  • You can still create billing alerts for each linked account.

CloudTrail

  • Per Linked account per region
  • Can consolidate logs using an S3 bucket
    • Turn on CloudTrail in the paying account
    • Create a bucket policy that allows cross-account access
    • Turn on CloudTrail in the other accounts and use the bucket in the paying account.

Consolidated Billing Advantages

  • One bill per AWS account
  • Very easy to track charges and allocate costs
  • Volume pricing discount.
Reserved Instances

Best Practices

  • Always enable MFA on the root account
  • Always use a strong and complex password on root account
  • The paying account should be used for BILLING PURPOSES ONLY!
    • Do not deploy resources in to a paying account!!
    • You can, but don’t! 🙂

Exam Tips

  • Consolidated billing allows you to get colume discounts on all your accounts.
  • Unused Reserved Instances for EC2 are applied across the group.
  • CloudTrail is on a per-account, per-region bases, but all can be aggregated into a single S3 bucket in the paying account.

 

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