AWS Account Management Policy Comparison - AWS Organizations vs IAM Switch Role
I’ll introduce the benefits and drawbacks of AWS Organizations and IAM Switch Role for AWS account management policies.
Depending on the scale of your development project, you might wonder: “Should I use AWS Organizations or IAM Switch Role?” This article summarizes what I learned from SRE experts regarding this question.
✅ Centralized permission management
You can centrally manage login users. You can also set which accounts each user can log into and perform fine-grained permission management.
✅ Centralized billing management
✅ Hierarchical AWS management
Think of it like making GCP projects work like AWS accounts.
❌ Complex setup makes design challenging
✅ Multi-account setup with minimal effort
By preparing Switch Roles for each account, you can immediately enable multi-account management.
❌ Need to configure Switch Role for each account
❌ Cannot manage accounts
Billing cannot be consolidated.
❌ Fine-grained permission management seems difficult
You cannot grant permissions to specific users when using Switch Role.
That’s all from understanding AWS account design, management, and operational best practices from the Gemba.