The Pillars of Proper Isolation

Reliable and secure systems are built on isolation, both between development and  production and between applications. Isolation enables teams to achieve least-privilege access and deploy confidently while minimizing the blast radius of change.

People

People should only have access to the services for which they are responsible

Isolated environments should be easy to reason about

Coworkers doing their jobs should never be a risk to your performance or reliability

Process

All organizations can benefit from isolated staging, production, and development environments, especially ones with compliance obligations like SOC 2 or ISO 27001

Promote change through development, staging, and production

Accessing isolated services through their own isolated IAM roles reduces the blast radius of changes

Tools

Accounts are the most complete form of isolation available in AWS today

Connecting two AWS accounts over the network is simple and explicit

Working with many AWS accounts should be easy