AWS Organizations and AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) (for example, multi-account Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, Amazon VPC, Route 53)

Interview Question 1:

AWS Organizations is a service that allows you to consolidate and manage multiple AWS accounts centrally. It provides a way to create groups of accounts and apply policies to those groups for governance. With AWS Organizations, you can automate account creation, set up consolidated billing, and enforce compliance and security policies across your AWS accounts.

Interview Question 2:

AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) enables you to share AWS resources such as Amazon VPC subnets, AWS Transit Gateways, and AWS Route tables with other AWS accounts. The benefits include avoiding duplicate resources, saving costs, simplifying the management of shared resources, and enabling a centralized governance model while maintaining the ability to operate within a multi-account AWS environment.

Interview Question 3:

The primary use cases for utilizing a multi-account strategy with AWS Transit Gateway include network isolation for security or organizational boundaries, centralized management and monitoring, simplified inter-account connectivity, cost allocation, and limits exposure to account-level failures or breaches.

Interview Question 4:

With a multi-account environment, AWS Transit Gateway acts as a central hub that manages traffic routing among multiple VPCs and on-premises networks. It simplifies network architecture by allowing you to connect all your VPCs and branch networks to a single gateway and manage routing using route tables, without requiring individual peering connections between each VPC.

Interview Question 5:

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated network connection from on-premises to AWS. In a multi-account setup, it can help reduce costs, improve bandwidth throughput, and offer more consistent network performance compared to standard internet-based connections. Moreover, it supports AWS Transit Gateway to facilitate private, direct connections to multiple AWS accounts through a single connection.

Interview Question 6:

Amazon Route 53 can be used in multi-account architectures to provide scalable DNS and domain name registration services. You can manage routing policies to direct traffic to different AWS accounts based on geographic location, latency, or other criteria. This ensures high availability and fault-tolerance across your accounts.

Interview Question 7:

Service Control Policies (SCPs) are a type of policy that can be used within AWS Organizations to manage permissions and control the actions that users and roles can perform across multiple AWS accounts. SCPs help ensure compliance with organizational policies and prevent actions that might violate security or operational best practices.

Interview Question 8:

To connect VPCs across different AWS accounts, you can use VPC peering, AWS Transit Gateway, or AWS RAM for resource sharing. VPC peering is used for direct network connections between two VPCs, while AWS Transit Gateway and AWS RAM enable you to share resources like a Transit Gateway to connect multiple VPCs without the need for individual peering relationships.

Interview Question 9:

AWS Organizations assists with cost management by offering consolidated billing, which aggregates the usage from all accounts in the organization to help you take advantage of volume discounts. Additionally, you can set up budget alerts and leverage cost allocation tags to track expenditures by department, project, or other criteria across your AWS environment.

Interview Question 10:

When sharing a Transit Gateway across AWS accounts using AWS RAM, you open the potential for network reachability between accounts. This increased connectivity can be beneficial but must be carefully managed to avoid unintended access. Proper security groups, network ACLs, and route table configurations should be in place to ensure that only the required traffic is allowed between accounts, maintaining a strong security posture.

Interview Question 11:

Some limitations with AWS RAM include the inability to share resources with AWS accounts outside of your organization if they are not part of an AWS Organizations structure with “all features” enabled. Additionally, not all resource types are shareable with AWS RAM, and there may be region-specific constraints or feature limitations on the shared resources. It’s also important to understand that sharing doesn’t extend the permissions for resource modification unless explicitly granted.

Interview Question 12:

To set up a shared VPC using AWS RAM, first ensure that the accounts are part of the same AWS Organizations, with sharing enabled. Then, from the owner account, create a Resource Share in AWS RAM and add the desired VPC or subnets to it. Specify the accounts or organizational units you want to share with and send the invitation. The receiving accounts need to accept the invitation to access the shared resources. Finally, set up the necessary permissions for the resources so the participant accounts can use them appropriately.