As much as I like for you to get building, I have also learned there are prerequisites (not enforced by AWS) that are required in order to be in control of your cloud. Here’s a shortlist of action items to complete before building. These action items may apply to Azure and any other clouds.
Cloud Culture
Everyone in your team is got to be on board with moving and staying in the cloud. If anyone’s attitude is off from the rest of the team then there will be some drawbacks from time to time. No one needs to be cloud experts but at least understand what is the cloud, how and why it’s secure, and lastly how to build and maintain your applications in it. This may include training. See The Cloud Journey Begins and Stay up to date with AWS news
Tagging
TAGGING IS SO DAMN IMPORTANT! (Sorry for the caps) Tagging is the ONLY way to survive in the cloud. A quick rundown on what’s important to tag right away. Do enforce it with Lambda or AWS Config. I’ll write about each of them in another blog on how to enforce tags.
- All Compute related resource must have at least a ‘Name’ tag! ‘Owner’ tag is definitely helpful for some resources.
- EC2’s, EBS’s, Auto Scaling Groups, AMI’s, snapshots, network interfaces, etc.
- Use AWS cost allocation tags if you care about more granular cost reports; especially if you’re using a single account for multiple projects or environments or clients.
Environments
How many environments? How are you going to divide the resources, by network within a single account or multiple account strategy? My opinion is to go to multiple accounts if you have enough team members or the knowledge or the budget to handle it. If it’s a sandbox or personal account, then one is generally fine.
Environments: Dev | Prod
Naming Standards
It’s simple as what the name says. Create your simple guide on how to name all the various resources and services in the cloud.
Example
Resource: EC2 instance: DevWordPress01
Account Naming
Your technical staff might not care about this as much as project managers and higher might. Name all the accounts according to their purpose, is it a security account or a project X account? More on account creation and management later!
Provide your feedback via comments. Thanks!
What’s next?
Best AWS Multi-Account Architecture
then?
How to create the AWS master account
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