Overview of an AWS Account

AWS, a global public cloud provider, offers a comprehensive suite of infrastructure, platform, and software services. An AWS account is necessary to utilize these services, enabling customers to create a wide range of resources and host their applications on AWS.

Each customer needs to have a secure environment within which to create and manage IT resources; this is where the concept of an AWS account comes in. An AWS account, by its very nature, offers an isolated resource container that grants secure access to AWS services and enables customers to configure necessary resources to host their applications.

While setting up an AWS account, you must provide an email address and password. These credentials are used to create the primary owner, who has full control over the account. On AWS, we call this owner the root user. Every AWS account created will have its dedicated root user. This root user can perform all account and billing-related activities and close the account if no longer required. Each AWS account also provides a natural billing boundary for costs incurred in that account and is associated with a specified billing method. Overall, an AWS account offers a means to securely administer all your resources and is only accessible to you and any entity you choose to grant access to.

In the following section, you’ll discover why many companies choose to set up multiple AWS accounts for handling diverse workloads. You’ll also learn why this practice of a multi-account strategy is considered a best practice in the industry.