Further reading

A short, opinionated list. These are the AWS documents worth reading end to end when setting up or restructuring an estate, rather than searching for a page at a time.

Account and organisational structure

• Organizing Your AWS Environment Using Multiple Accounts is the foundational document. It argues the case for the account as the primary isolation boundary — blast radius, billing separation, service quotas — and works through how to group accounts under AWS Organizations.
• Recommended OUs and accounts is the concrete half of that whitepaper: the Security, Infrastructure, Workloads, Sandbox and Suspended organisational units, what belongs in each, and which accounts every organisation ends up needing. Start here when a structure to copy matters more than the rationale.

Operating model

• Operating model, from the Well-Architected operational excellence pillar, covers who owns what once there is more than one team — fully separated, centralised and service-provider models, and the ownership questions each one forces.
• Implement the roadmap is the sequencing advice that usually gets skipped: which capabilities to stand up in what order when moving to a cloud operating model.

Starting points

• The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework organises adoption into six perspectives — business, people, governance, platform, security and operations. It is most useful as a checklist for finding the perspective nobody has thought about yet. This handbook covers it in Cloud Adoption Framework.
• The AWS whitepapers and guides index is the catalogue everything above comes from, filterable by product and category.