As businesses grow, so does their need to manage multiple AWS accounts efficiently. AWS Organizations helps by allowing you to manage and organize multiple accounts under a single umbrella. When setting up an AWS Organization, you’re given two choices: Consolidated billing or All features. Each option serves a different purpose, and understanding these options can help you manage your AWS resources more effectively.

Let’s break down what these options mean, how they work, and when to use them.

Consolidated Billing: Managing Costs Across Accounts

Consolidated billing is the simplest feature of AWS Organizations. Its primary purpose is to combine the billing for multiple AWS accounts so that you receive just one bill instead of managing several. It also allows you to share usage across accounts, making it possible to get volume-based pricing discounts when your combined usage qualifies for them.

Example:

Imagine a company with five departments, each using its own AWS account. By enabling consolidated billing, the company can:

• Get one bill for all five accounts instead of five separate ones.
• Combine the usage from all five accounts, allowing them to potentially save money by qualifying for discounts based on the total usage (like cheaper data transfer rates or EC2 instance savings).

However, it’s important to note that consolidated billing only handles cost management. It does not give you control over what each account is doing or allow you to enforce rules across them.

All Features: Full Control Over Multiple Accounts

The second option, All features, is a much more powerful tool in AWS Organizations. When you enable All features, you’re not just managing costs—you also gain the ability to control and govern what each account can do. This option is best for organizations that want to manage multiple AWS accounts centrally and ensure that security, compliance, and operational practices are followed consistently.

What Can You Do With All Features?

With All features enabled, you can:

1. Apply Service Control Policies (SCPs):
   SCPs allow you to control what actions each account can take. For instance, you can set policies that restrict certain accounts from using specific services (like preventing a department from launching expensive services or stopping them from deleting important data).
2. Tag Policies:
   You can enforce consistent naming conventions across all accounts. This is useful for tracking resources like EC2 instances, S3 buckets, or databases across different accounts, making it easier to organize and manage them.
3. Centralized Security and Logging:
   You can ensure that important security tools are turned on for all accounts and that no one can turn them off. For example, you can enforce that AWS CloudTrail (which tracks all actions taken in an account) is enabled in all accounts, making sure there’s always a log of what’s happening.
4. Cross-Account Resource Sharing:
   All features also allow sharing resources across accounts without the need for complicated permission setups. This can be useful when different departments need to access shared services.

Example:

Let’s say you’re the IT manager of a large company. Each department—Marketing, Finance, HR, and Engineering—has its own AWS account. With All features enabled, you can:

• Ensure that each department follows strict security policies (like making sure no one can disable logging or use unapproved services).
• Set up policies that restrict access to only the services each department needs. For example, the Finance department might need access to AWS RDS (databases), while Marketing only needs S3 (storage).
• Enforce consistent naming and tagging of resources across all departments to keep everything organized.

When to Use Consolidated Billing vs. All Features

• Consolidated Billing is ideal for businesses or organizations that only want to manage costs. It’s simple and focuses purely on making billing easier and potentially saving money by combining usage.
• All Features is for businesses that need centralized control over multiple AWS accounts. If you’re concerned about security, governance, and ensuring that all your accounts follow specific rules, All features is the right choice. It’s especially useful for large organizations with many accounts that need strict control over how resources are used.

Conclusion

Choosing between Consolidated billing and All features in AWS Organizations depends on your needs. If managing costs is your only concern, consolidated billing will do the job. But if you want to take full control over multiple accounts—governing security, access, and resource usage—then enabling All features is the way to go. It offers a robust set of tools that help you manage and control everything from a central point, ensuring consistency across your AWS accounts.

In summary:

• Consolidated billing: Simplifies billing and helps reduce costs by sharing discounts across accounts.
• All features: Provides full control, including security policies, resource tagging, and centralized management for all AWS accounts in your organization.

Choosing the right feature set depends on your organizational needs, but both options help streamline the management of multiple AWS accounts.