When starting with AWS, many organizations assume that they will only need one or two accounts. They quickly realize they need many more and end up with ten, 50, or more accounts. This is a common situation when customers onboard new business units, set up application workloads, and/or provision new accounts in AWS Control Tower. Yet, unplanned account proliferation can create networking challenges. In today’s article, I’ll share the next steps to tackle this challenge and achieve networking at scale within AWS with a self-service pattern that will help you achieve a unified, secure, scalable, and extendable cloud foundation.
There are four important steps to developing a self-service pattern that I’ll share today. They are:
- VPC deployment approaches
- IP address space management
- AWS Transit Gateway, the backbone of the network in AWS
- Network connectivity management
Network at Scale for Future Growth
To deploy any business-supporting application in the AWS cloud, enabling a baseline of support services is important. For example, you’ll want to create an account structure with distribution based on duty, compliance, and specific workloads; you’ll also want to create accounts for billing, production, non-production, and more. Last, you’ll want accounts for network connectivity, monitoring, and security. Moreover, there are several AWS services that establish the foundation for workloads, before an application is even deployed.
The baseline I reference above is achieved by enabling a multitude of AWS services such as AWS Control Tower, AWS Organizations, AWS IAM, AWS SSO, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, and Amazon GuardDuty. These services may not be enabled automatically, yet work together to form a security baseline. Couple this list of services with account proliferation and it’s easy to see why networking at scale quickly becomes imperative. Indeed, many organizations choose AWS to give them greater agility and flexibility. A network that can gracefully manage current and future demands is a necessary component to achieving this level of agility.