Have Lots of AWS Accounts

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

meistro

16 points

8 comments

src-bin.comTechstory

calmpositive

Debate

20/100

AWSCloud ManagementDevops

Key topics

AWS

Cloud Management

Devops

The article argues that having multiple AWS accounts is beneficial for organization and security, and the discussion explores the practical implications and strategies for managing multiple accounts.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

Peak period

2-3h

Avg / period

1.6

Key moments

01Story posted
Oct 21, 2025 at 4:52 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Oct 21, 2025 at 7:25 PM EDT
3h after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
3 comments in 2-3h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Oct 22, 2025 at 2:25 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (8 comments)

Showing 8 comments

dariusj18

3 months ago

2 replies

But then if yoy pay for support it only works in one account

electroly

3 months ago

1 reply

Assuming you're playing the "only pay for a business support plan when you actually need to file a ticket" game like me, with a very slight amount of effort this works in your favor instead of being a downside. Put your expensive-but-reliable stuff (e.g. large 24/7 EC2 instances, your S3 buckets) in one account and your cheap-but-fiddly stuff (e.g. your EKS cluster) in another account. When you need support on the fiddly stuff you're only paying a percent of that account.

At work we did not follow this advice, so we have a single account and we're vulnerable to an unnecessarily high support bill if we happen to need to file a ticket in an expensive month. We could have avoided this with account segmentation; our expensive stuff tends not to be the stuff we need support on.

arthurcolle

3 months ago

1 reply

This seems like a ton of work

electroly

3 months ago

That's always the case with AWS: reducing costs takes legwork, and by the same token, you can avoid legwork by accepting a higher bill.

kondro

3 months ago

Enterprise support agreements are organization-wide.

Although, you can gamify Business support (which is priced as a percentage of your bill) to not include things like your CloudTrail account, which probably never require support, but can get expensive across a large enough organization.

time4tea

3 months ago

If you use aws control tower to set up your stuff, this will happen sort of automatically.

Its been recommended practice for ages...

Use SCP (service control policy) to disable any services and regions you dont use. Tada. Much harder to get unexpected bill, much easier to enforce audit etc.

craigmcnamara

3 months ago

Root account for billing and AWS Identity Center. Dev account for all the crap and lax permissions so people can try stuff. Production account with only production and extremely strict permissions where changes can only be made with terraform or a god mode account.

add-sub-mul-div

3 months ago

Thank god I was saved from having to read the first two words of that headline. We should have faulty paternalistic algorithms governing even more of our lives.

View full discussion on Hacker News

ID: 45661545Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:33:22 PM

Want the full context?

Jump to the original sources

Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.

Open link View on HN