Possible paths to combining two separate AWS accounts

How are the two stacks related to each other? That is, separate workloads/applications, different parts of a single workload, some other separation entirely? I think leaving resources where they are and adding the accounts to an AWS Organization is probably the best solution regardless, but this is especially the case for two distinct workloads. It's very common to run different workloads on different accounts; in fact many customers will go a step farther and split by environment as well. In that scenario you might have one account for TS-A Prod, another for TS-A QA, TS-A Dev, etc.

Using Organizations will simplify your billing, and as long as you're diligent in running workloads in the right accounts it's easy to allocate costs between them. In addition to the billing consolidation and optional management/governance functionality, Organizations also may let you take advantage of lower unit pricing offered by some services. For instance S3 Standard storage is $0.023/GB for the first 50 TB/Month, and $0.022/GB for the next 450 TB/Month. Two standalone accounts using 40 TB/Month of S3 Standard would pay the higher price for all their usage, but if they were in the same Organization then 30 TB/Month would be billed at the lower rate.

I would not say Organizations is absolutely the best answer for all scenarios like this though. Can I ask what problem you hope to solve by consolidating into a single account?

They are currently two separate workloads, but in the future (6 months more or less) they will become integrated with some desired interoperability. The immediate problem we are seeking to solve is largely the desire to manage the Budget of the full spend in one "package" and not independently. If managed using Organizations I understand you to say that we can have a consolidated billing and management/governance capability. That is surfacing as the best plan.

Hi Charles, that's correct. Using an Organization will consolidate the billing for all member accounts to a single invoice. The invoice itself is broken down by account however, so you'll still have easy visibility into each account's usage and charges. Cost Explorer will also allow you to analyze your spend across all member accounts if viewed from the Organization's management account.

If you'd like to go a step further I would suggest you look into cost allocation tags and the Cost and Usage Report. Cost allocation tags allow you to track spend using resource tags you may already have in place, and the Cost and Usage Report is a highly detailed accounting of service usage and charges for a standalone account, or an entire Organization. There's no additional charge for setting one up beyond S3 storage fees for the report itself.

Here are some links you may find helpful:

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/orgs_manage_org_support-all-features.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/ce-what-is.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/cost-alloc-tags.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur.html
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/cost-tagging-and-reporting-with-aws-organizations/