How to differentiate between different AWS Environments - Dev, Test, Stage, Production?

Question

I would want to have different environments in AWS. At first I thought of differentiating environments by Tags, tags on AWS Resources. But then I cannot restrict users to change Tags of the machine. What that means is, if I allow them ec2:CreateTags, they can not only create tag, but also change tag of any of the resources, since cannot apply a condition on it - say for example if it belongs to a particular VPC or subnet. If I don't allow them the previlege to create tag, then they can launch an instance but their tags are not applied and hence any further operation on the instance is not permitted.

If I want to distinguish between environments by VPC-ID, then for operations such as ec2:StartInstance cannot apply a condition to allow the operation only in a specific VPC-ID, but can conditionally allow based on Resource Tag which for reasons in previous paragraph is not convincing.

On AWS documentation it mentions

One approach to maintaining this separation was discussed in the Working with AWS Access Credentials, that is, to use different accounts for development and production resources.

So it is possible to have one Paying Account for several other accounts which themselves are Paying Accounts? I still don't think multiple accounts for just different environments is a good idea.

How do you generally differentiate among environments for enforcing policies?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Different accounts is the way to go. There are so many places you'll want to create isolation that you'll make yourself crazy trying to do it within one account. Think about it - there's network controls, all the IAM permissions for all the services, access control lists, tags that have the limitations you describe, and on and on. Real isolation comes from putting things in different accounts for now.

The last thing you want is some weakness in your dev environment to pivot into your production environment - end of story. Consider also the productivity benefit of separating prod and dev accounts... you'll never break a prod system from a mistake or experiment in development.

Consolidated billing is the answer to paying for it all. Easy to setup and track. If you need more reporting, look into CloudAbility.

Where this gets really interesting is in the space of multiple production and multiple dev environments. There are a lot of opinions on isolation there. Some people combine all prod and dev into two accounts, and some put every prod and dev into their own. It all depends on your risk profile. Just don't end up like CloudSpaces.