Item: AWS Control Tower
Rating: 9
Author: kevin mcgillicuddy

Overall Satisfaction with AWS Control Tower

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We started using AWS Control Tower to split up our workloads into separate accounts to follow the AWS well-architected framework. AWS Control Tower makes it easy to create new accounts and drive policies across them all. So our root account handles creating other accounts for us and ensures they all have logging and our security practices in place.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easily create new AWS accounts.
Easily secure and manage AWS accounts.
Landing zone with SSO is a huge win for larger teams.

Cons

Can be slow at times to reflect changes.
The GUI in the console is not always the most user-friendly and errors can be non-descript.
Cannot change some key info about an account from AWS Control Tower once it's provisioned.

Most Important Features

Security
Central logging
SSO support

Return on Investment

Less time manually deploying accounts which was error prone.
Central logging allowed us to have 1 place to view logs.

Alternatives Considered

We did not look at other vendors because we generally want to try to use AWS native products as much as possible for greater support directly from AWS and to reduce 3rd party priority shifts.

Key Insights

Do you think AWS Control Tower delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with AWS Control Tower's feature set?

Yes

Did AWS Control Tower live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of AWS Control Tower go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy AWS Control Tower again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

AWS Control Tower is great if you have multiple organizations or disciplines inside a company that needs to be separated for billing purposes or separation of concern. Multiple accounts is part of AWS's well-architected framework and are generally a good idea. AWS Control Tower makes central logging easy which enables those logs to be quickly picked up by a logging tool to provide even more reports and insight. For smaller organizations, AWS Control Tower may seem like an over-engineered solution

Comments

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Control tower is a must for separation of concerns