AWS Control Tower vs. AWS Systems Manager

AWS Control Tower is great if you have multiple organizations or disciplines inside a company that needs to be separated for billing purposes or separation of concern. Multiple accounts is part of AWS's well-architected framework and are generally a good idea. AWS Control Tower makes central logging easy which enables those logs to be quickly picked up by a logging tool to provide even more reports and insight. For smaller organizations, AWS Control Tower may seem like an over-engineered solution

Incentivized

When you have a process running in aws that needs to copy files to group of instances as part of the process Installing software on a group of machines Adding Cloudwatch agent to instance.

Incentivized

• AWS Control Tower integrates with AWS organizations
• AWS Control Tower provides Account Factory to provision preconfigured AWS accounts
• AWS Control Tower helps to isolate workloads and billing via AWS accounts separation
• AWS Control Tower supports data residency controls out of the box
• AWS Control Tower supports post provisioning actions to newly provisioned AWS accounts: for example it can trigger enabling VPC flow logs in the new account

Incentivized

• Copy files to a group of instance with particular tag
• Enable CW agent and push metrics to CW
• Easy to install software in a group of instances.

Incentivized

• This level of abstraction leaves you vulnerable to not knowing exactly what's been created, and that can enable you to mess things up.
• Because it provisions things on your behalf, you might end up paying for resources you don't need.
• The import process of existing accounts, which we did not end up pursuing, is tedious and manual.

Incentivized

• I would like to see the Search feature improved a bit more.
• UI is little bit confusing initially

Incentivized

There is no way to easily close an AWS account whether it was created manually or via the AWS Control Tower. It takes too many steps to close it vs to provision a new AWS account

Incentivized

Using AWS Systems Manager and other slightly lower level components has been helpful for us to manage parts of our AWS presence at a more granular level than AWS Control Tower was designed for. It's not at all an apples-to-apples comparison as they solve different use cases, but for us, the use case associated with AWS Systems Manager was a better fit for our specific needs and skillsets. We did not need everything that AWS Control Tower was doing for us.

Incentivized

• AWS Control tower allowed us to drop several third-party vendors for security appliances and logging, which saved us considerable funds.
• AWS Control tower reduced the amount of time we spend deploying AWS accounts.
• AWS Control tower reduced the amount of time we have to spend on quarterly security audits.

Incentivized

• Reduced team's time spent on EC2 management
• Patch management
• Remote access

Incentivized