org-formation-cli VS aws-control-tower-customizations

And these guardrails are usually owned by platform teams. One downside to doing all these with AWS Organizations is that it involves a lot of clickops… This is where I would turn to org-formation, an open-source tool that gives you infrastructure-as-code for AWS Organizations. It’s a really powerful tool and I strongly recommend that you check it out if you haven’t already.

If you don’t like control tower, try org formation. https://github.com/org-formation/org-formation-cli

I found myself bootstrapping a new AWS Organization. I am using org-formation to define the basic account structure, an OIDC IdP for Github Actions and the essential roles for Terraform to do its job.

an AWS account is free, so if you're planning basically reselling AWS, an account per tenant is a nobrainer. There are a few ways to create loads of accounts, org-formation is my favorite

We use https://github.com/org-formation/org-formation-cli for most of our work, though just vanilla Terraform can work reasonably well for most of the things.

By the way, if you like the "deploy this stack to multiple accounts"-feature of Stacksets, you're going to lovveee org-formation.

This led me to two problems. The first was the perennial issue I've had with Terraform from day one: "How do I manage state?". The second issue was how do I leverage some form of CI/CD tooling to allow me to leverage one of Terraform's biggest strengths - the terraform plan capability. Since Fooli is an AWS product, I figured that I should be able to use AWS native tools for this. I've used CodePipeline in the past to preview change-sets with aws-org-formation, so I thought it would be easy to find a well-worn pattern from AWS on doing it.

You can now manage your AWS Organization through CloudFormation, including creating accounts, organizational units, and policies. It's one of those things you are surprised were not already possible. However, I will stick to the OrgFormation for my own accounts, as it offers additional features like deploying stacks and performing custom logic across the organization.

For my landing zone I used the Customizations for AWS Control Tower (CfCt) project. When I created my landing zone the Landing Zone Accelerator was not yet available. I still need to evaluate if I can switch, but my initial concerns are the cost of running it. CfCt has low costs and depending on your usage it might even fit in the free tier. The Landing Zone Accelerator comes with VPCs and transit gateways and some other services that will generate costs regardless of what you are doing with the landing zone.

The team at AWS that have developed the SRA utilised Customisations for Control Tower (CfCT) as the delivery mechanism for there customisations but since they don't maintain that solution itself, it's strongly recommended to check the current version of CfCT here prior to launching the CloudFormation Template.