Onboarding Multiple AWS Linked Accounts with CloudFormation

Onboarding Multiple AWS Linked Accounts to nOps with CloudFormation

nOps requires safe, secure, and AWS-approved access to your AWS accounts in order to give you the analysis, dashboards, and reports that you need. We only see what you want us to see in order to provide our services, no more, and we need you to give us permission first.

In order to credential and register multiple accounts, we leverage AWS Organizations, CloudFormation, Stack, StackSets, and Lambda.

For multi-account setup, nOps recommends the use of CloudFormation.

Prerequisites

• You must have Admin role permissions in AWS before you can add multiple AWS accounts to nOps using CloudFormation.

• You have configured your Payer account.

• Enable Stackset in AWS Organizations and AWS CloudFormation within AWS.

• Stackset Trusted Access must be enabled.

Once you’ve taken care of the prerequisites, the next steps are simple and straightforward.

Adding Multiple AWS Accounts (CloudFormation)

If you don’t have Stacksets enabled, or Trusted Access enabled, follow the steps below.

Enable Stacksets

To enable CloudFormation StackSets in AWS Organizations, go to AWS Organizations > Services. If you see Access disabled for CloudFormation StackSets, you will need to enable it.

Once enabled, you should see Access enabled:

Enable Trusted Access

When navigating to CloudFormation –> StackSets, you will be able to tell if Trusted Access is enabled. If it’s not, there will be a blue banner stating Tusted Access is not enabled. Click to enable Trusted Access. You may choose to disable it after configuration if you wish to do so.

Create a Stackset for the Linked Accounts

To create and deploy a stackset for the linked accounts, make sure that you are logged into your AWS Management Account with Admin rights. The process to create the Stackset to casade down to all of your linked accounts, nOps will use a Cloudformation stack to configur the Stackset.

Within the nOps Platform

To get started, you will need to be logged in as an admin in the nOps platform.

1. To the top right, navgiate to your login –> Organization Settings.
2. Click on the Cloudformation Multiple Accounts Setup button.
3. Confirm you are logged into your AWS Management account with admin rights, then click Proceed.

Within the nOps Platform

In the new tab that opens, everything is pre-filled for you in the Cloudformation Stack.

1. Confirm the account you are logged into is the management account the Stack is deploying in.
2. Scroll down to the bottom and click Create Stack.

This process can take several minutes to complete.

If you have any questions, please contact us at help@nops.io.