Implement groups and roles

Implementing groups and roles is crucial for enforcing governance policies within your cloud environment. This approach enables organizations to maintain control over resources, ensuring that costs are managed while achieving business objectives efficiently. It encourages accountability and oversight, preventing unapproved resource expenditures.

Best Practices

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Utilize RBAC to assign permissions based on user roles. This ensures only authorized personnel can create, modify, or decommission resources, minimizing inadvertent expenses and enhancing security. Establish clear role definitions to align with business needs.
• Environment Segregation: Create distinct groups for development, testing, and production environments. This separation helps manage costs effectively by applying different policies or budgets, ensuring that non-production activities do not incur unexpected charges.

Supporting Questions

• Are access permissions regularly reviewed to align with changing project needs?

Roles and Responsibilities

• Cloud Administrators: Responsible for managing user access and resource allocation based on established group policies, ensuring that cost governance is applied consistently across all environments.
• Project Managers: Oversee resource usage in projects, ensuring that the budget is adhered to and that all requested resources fall under the appropriate groups.

Artifacts

• Access Control Policy Document: A formal document outlining the rules and permissions associated with different user roles in the organization, ensuring clarity around governance and cost management.
• Resource Allocation Dashboard: A monitoring tool that visualizes resource usage and costs attributed to each group, helping identify overspending and optimize costs.

Cloud Services

AWS

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): IAM helps manage user access to AWS services and resources securely, allowing administrators to set permissions for groups and roles in compliance with governance policies.
• AWS Organizations: This service enables management of multiple AWS accounts, providing cost visibility and policies implementation at an organizational level to enhance cost optimization.

Question: How do you govern usage?
Pillar: Cost Optimization (Code: COST)