I will be hosting infrastructure for several different clients. Complete, total, 100% separation of client's AWS infrastructure is necessary (leagal etc). So I need some advice on how best to structure my accounts.
I will have a master account with MFA. It will not actually ever spin-up and infrastructure. It is merely to be a top-level billing account. Then each client will have their own separate AWS account. With I guess a separate root login and separate MFA. Each client account will be linked to the Master account for consolidated billing. This is neat because if they move their business else where then we just give them the IAM details for the account and strike it off from Master and we are done.
What I am not sure of is that to set up a brand new AWS account you need a unique email account. We don't want the client to ever have to first setup the account so do we need to have a whole bunch of email aliases to use on our company domain (client#mydomain.com, client2#mydomain.com etc) and then use them to set up new AWS accounts? Is there a better way than this? It could get pretty clunky to have to have a new email alias every time a new client joins.
Second, will we need a box full of MFA devices - one for each account, or will the same device work for all accounts?
Any pointers gratefully received. Thanks
If you have a Gmail address like example#gmail.com, then you can register AWS accounts using email addresses like:
example+CUSTOMER1#gmail.com
example+CUSTOMER2#gmail.com
example+CUSTOMER3#gmail.com
and all the emails will go to your same gmail account. You could auto forward from gmail to another address.
This also works for Google Apps email addresses, if you are using that to host your company email.
Instead of physical MFA devices, you can use the Google Authenticator app on an Android or iPhone with one entry for each customer AWS account.
You mention consolidated billing in your question title, but not in your question.
Beware the following re. consolidated billing:
If you purchase reserved instances for one client, the benefit of that will be shared with all your clients, so your costs will be out of sync.
If you plan to re-charge your clients, and you want to use reserved instances, don't use consolidated billing.
As for you question:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en
Most email platforms support some form of aliasing.
You may also be interested in
http://www.nightbluefruit.com/blog/2014/02/command-line-tool-for-checking-status-of-instances-in-amazon-ec2/
Related
I have recently made a program that listens to a PUB/SUB topic that is connected to a Gmail account. I have it all working fine. When a push notification arrives it will do different tasks based on the message content.
The problem is that I use a Service Account to connect to all the API's on Google Cloud Platform that I need. The Service Account allows access to ALL of our Gmail accounts in our organization. I need to somehow limit the access to a specific Gmail account.
The closest I could find to this issue was this question Impersonating list of users with Google Service Account. However, the only solution presented there was to turn my project into a marketplace app which I do not want to do.
I have tried setting up an Organizational Unit and trying to limit the scope to that somehow, but there seems to be know way (that I can find) to do it. I did try speak with Google Cloud Platform help but they didn't know the answer as it didn't quite fall under their area of expertise and referred me on to another help group, but I'm not eligible for them because I don't pay for support.
Edit: It doesn't actually appear that what I want to do is possible. I'll be going back to an OAuth2 method of authentication.
Understanding service accounts explains the possibilities:
Service accounts can be thought of as both a resource and as an identity.
When thinking of the service account as an identity, you can grant a role to a service account, allowing it to access a resource (such as a project).
When thinking of a service account as a resource, you can grant roles to other users to access or manage that service account.
Now try to fit that impracticable intent into there ...
If you need to limit the access of the service account to user-specific resources, this can only be done on the application level, not the system level - since a service account can impersonate just any user identity; eg. in order not to mess up the ownership, when uploading files on behalf of a user. If you want 1 user identity to access 1 user-specific resource, why even use a service account? And when using a service account, why not just impersonate as the correct identity? This could even be hard-coded, if it's only 1 user identity. But nevertheless, it can only be done on the application level - but cannot be configured for the service account itself.
I'm working with a client right now that has a legacy application hosted by a 3rd party vendor on their amazon account. That legacy app was using Amazon SES for their mailing.
I created the clients own amazon account (as I don't have access to continue the build out on clients account), and am now seeing the issue where I need to transition the SES DNS validation over to their account.
I'm wondering what kind of downtime I would see, or problems I'd create by updating the DNS entry of _amazonses.mydomain.com from what it was on the past account to this new account.
My concern is by updating that entry, I would break the legacy system which I don't have the ability to update.
Thank you
You don't have any downtime, you can verify the domains in two different account, it just you need to add multiple TXT value to the record "_amazonses.mydomain.com".
e.g: _amazonses.mydomain.com
"txt-value-1"
"txt-value0-2"
As long as your clients are using their own credentials, emails flow just fine, once you confirm everything is good, you can remove your record from there.
If no,
You can still use SES sending authorization and allow them to use the domain verified in your account, doing this, they can only use your sending domain to send emails but emails will go from their account and they will be charged, their account should be in production.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/sending-authorization.html
I'm building a service where the end users can create organizations. Other users may then be added to the organization, and each organization may have a number of administrators.
The service is built on AWS.
Now, when an organization is created, I'd like to automatically create an email address corresponding to the organization, and forward all messages sent to this address to the external e-mail addresses of the administrators of the organization.
So for example let's say the domain of my service is example.com, and Alice (alice#somewhere.com) creates an organization called Foobar. She also adds Bob (bob#somewhere.com) as a second administrator.
I'd then like to register admins-foobar#example.com as a valid mailbox, and whenever someone sends e-mail to this address, it should be forwarded to alice#somewhere.com and bob#somewhere.com, ideally also with the reply path set to the original sender, so that Alice and Bob can answer support questions.
The purpose of this is to have a single point of contact for support issues etc for all the users within an organization.
I've used AWS SES and AWS WorkMail in the past, mostly for transactional mail, notifications and for statically created incoming mailboxes for support etc, but I cannot seem to find if what I want is possible to do through the AWS SDK.
First of all, I'm not sure if what I want to do requires AWS WorkMail at all or if this is somehow possible to solve using AWS SES and trigger rules, but I first looked at WorkMail. The AWS WorkMail SDK enables creating users and enabling mailboxes for them through the SDK, and users are grouped into organizations. However, I cannot find a way to create organizations through the SDK, only through the AWS web console!
Second, I cannot find how I can programmatically set up e-mail rules for forwarding e-mail sent to the created users' mailboxes.
Is this possible at all using AWS services?
I'm looking for the best approach for organizing sending emails via Amazon SES in development and production environment.
Is it possible to separate two SES accounts (one for production, one for development) within one account ID? Development using production SES account is not an option because SES pushes events to queues (deliveries, bounces etc) which are processing all the time.
The solutions which I see at the moment are:
Create completely new Amazon account with only one service active (SES).
I read something about IAM policies but I'm not sure is it a good direction.
I read something about sandbox but if I good understand it only exists for new accounts (?)
Maybe someone heard/resolve that problem with more elegance solution?
You could setup your production SES in one AWS region (like us-east-1), and your test SES in a different region (like us-west-2). I'm not sure if this would be better or more elegant than using two separate AWS accounts. It depends on your exact needs.
When you setup SES in a region it will be in sandbox mode until you request AWS take it out of sandbox mode.
When you setup your deployment environments, it would be better if you create a separate AWS account for production and another one for testing and staging. You can setup consolidated billing and AWS organizations to simplify the management of multiple accounts. In addition, you can get a test domain for testing and staging deployments, where you can configure it with SES to send mails.
Answering your questions in order
Create separate accounts not only for SES, a separate one for production deployment.
Using IAM alone you won't be able to manage isolated triggers in SES.
In any account Sandbox is default for SES, You need to contact AWS support and increase the limits.
I am a longtime Amazon.com customer, and now I am interested in using Amazon Web Services (AWS). So I have a question on creating an AWS account.
Do I have an option to create an AWS account that's completely separate from my Amazon.com account (with different email addresses)?
What would happen if I use the same email address for AWS and Amazon.com?
Soooo..... Ages ago... I made an AWS account, it will not let me log in to normal amazon.com with that account telling me every time my password is incorrect which it is not.... attempting to create a new account with same email asks me if i want to disable my old account..... so yea it seems the answer is:
YES: simply create the account from AWS.
If creating accounts at amazon.com THEN aws with same e-mail, you will have one linked account to log in to both.
On the other hand if both are created seperately on different e-mails, and somehow one gets compromised the other doesn't, but then you have two different logins to deal with.
So as it turns out they lied about it disabling my aws account, I decided to try it, and now I have two accounts under the same e-mail, with different passwords... So if you want that, create on aws first, then create with same email on amazon.com and when it says it will disable the other account, don't worry it won't, however it will require you to choose a different password.
Oh and one last thing... If I try to log into AWS with Amazon.com password it brings me to create a new AWS account and it's a pain to get out of that screen...
My Amazon Retail account was compromised last week. I closed it and guess what - no access to my Amazon AWS account. On querying this I was told (by Amazon) that you have to have an Amazon Retail account and that it has to be THE SAME account as your AWS one.
So a service that is a honeypot for criminals gives them the keys to your Web based business, and Amazon have zero interest in separating the two. That is nuts - sites are moving next week, can't take the risk.
People have been shouting about it on the Amazon forum for years, so I think that whilst there may be workarounds the fundamental principle must be correct. I can't risk playing about with workarounds for something as dumb as this.
These are both great questions
First,
Yes, you can and SHOULD create an aws root account email that is unique for your AWS account(s). While approaches may vary, and your email server may filter out what would otherwise be perfectly applicable emails, here is how I do it
I create an email account that is ONLY for my AWS root accounts.
AWS Requires EVERY AWS account to have a unique email
here is my pattern: myname.aws.accts#gmail.com
I have an admin (Organization) account, so I use the following email: myname.aws.accts+admin#gmail.com
I have one prod, one test and one dev account. Here are the following email patterns:
myname.aws.accts+prod#gmail.com; myname.aws.accts+test#gmail.com; myname.aws.accts+dev#gmail.com.
I've also used the pattern: myname.aws.accts+123456789012#gmail.com where 123456789012 represents the AWS Account number.
These are all interpreted as unique by AWS but route to the same email account: myname.aws.accts#gmail.com
One last comment. I have another client who uses MS Exchange and for some reason the email+extension#mybiz.com has the 'extension' portion filtered out, and these emails do NOT process. In this biz we worked around this by creating alias' emails that are still unique to AWS and aliased them in the exchange server to the awsadmin# email. does the job. probably not best practice, but in a pinch...
Second
Yes. You can link your AWS and amazon.com accounts to the same root user email.
DON'T DO IT
This is generally an anti-pattern. NOT best practice, and fraught with problems...
I know of no good reason to do this. Once done, it is nigh near impossible to convince AWS - AMAZON to unlink these accounts. You WONT be able to separate them yourself - they are strongly coupled once the link is made. you might succeed in separating your AWS and AMAZON account if you are a paying customer of AWS business or Enterprise level support, and even then, they may tell you to just delete the AWS account if you don't want AWS and amazon shared.
Once the two accounts - store and AWS - are created with the same email account, I believe they are forever linked via a single master Amazon account, and there seems to be no way to separate them: If you change the password or email address on one, it reflects in the other.
When my only AWS use was an unimportant VM with a website, it was no big deal, but once I start hosting higher-value stuff, it gets a lot more scary.
As far as I can tell, the only way to separate them is to create a new AWS account (with different email address) and transfer your resources from the old to the new.
This appears to be a painful exercise, you can't directly move an EC2 instance, though you can transfer a snapshot of an image, but everything else I don't know about yet. I would be surprised if I could transfer a fixed Elastic IP, which means changing an IP address I've been using for a long time.
In the short term - as far as I can tell - the only way to secure AWS from your consumer account compromise is to put MFA on the AWS account and then use IAM for access. That's not a bad idea anyway.
I'll be creating a new AWS account (with different email address) for all stuff going forward, and transitioning old-to-new as I get to it, but this looks like a miserable (and unbillable) exercise.
It's just crazy that Amazon doesn't appear to have a way to address this.
Yay for me being an early adopter?
EDIT: It might be possible to link two accounts via "Organizations"; that might give some options for migration that are a bit less painful. Not sure yet.
EDIT Nov 2022: Amazon appears to have rolled out split credentials: when I logged into my unified account - same email for store and AWS - it invited me to create a diff password for the AWS stuff. This is wonderful!
So your AWS and Amazon are the same accounts so you cannot create a separate retail account with the same address. (Though you can get around it by doing email+SOMETHING#domain.toplevel) So if your amazon.com account gets compromised, they theoretically have access to your AWS account.
To keep your AWS account secure, there are a few things you can do. Firstly and probably most importantly, you need to make sure you have MFA setup on the account. In fact, you should do this whether you use amazon.com with the same account or not.
I heavily suggest looking at the Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks on AWS' website.
The rule of thumb here: they are not interchangeable.
If you created AWS account it will not allow you to login automatically to Amazon.com.
The same with consumer account, it doesn't provide access to AWS by default, because AWS has separate verification process.
Amazon Music account means access to consumer Amazon.com but not to AWS.
Though, I never tried to delete AWS and don't know what happens if you delete either of them, whether this causes deletion of the other or not.