Sign Up for New AWS Account using Nucleator Naming Conventions

Conventions

To keep things consistent across the different ways to refer to and log into the management console for an AWS Account, we recommend AWS Account Names with two parts:

• customer_name: a descriptor of the customer on who's behalf the Account was created.  This may be your own organization, or someone else's.
• account_name: a descriptor of the underlying purpose of the account.  For example, "master", "test1", "adhoc"

Customer Name

Note that Customer name must contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters and the dash character.  The Customer name will be used in S3 bucket names and AWS CloudFormation template names, which must follow this convention. If a customer name that does not match these restrictions is used, the command line tool will print an error message noting that the customer name is invalid.

Account Friendly Name

The Account "Friendly Name" is used as a convenient way to refer to one of a particular Customer's AWS Accounts.  It must be unique within the Customer.  We will often refer to the Account Friendly Name as account_name or simply as "account". Like the Customer name, the account name may contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters and the dash character. If an account name is used that does not meet these restrictions the command line tool will print an error noting that the account name is invalid.

AWS Account Name

When you sign up for an AWS Account, it will ask you for a Name.  You may think that this should be the name of a human, but we recommend using this name to identify both the Customer and the Friendly Name of the resulting AWS Account.  While you can use whatever name you'd like for the AWS Account Name, to avoid confusion we strongly recommend that you name the Account using the Nucleator Customer Name and Account Friendly Name separated by a dash, for example:

# generally: {{customer_name}}-{{account_name}}
 
47lining-test1
othercustomer-analytics
yetanothercustomer-production

This AWS Account Name will show up prominently in the header bar (upper right) whenever you log into the root Account.  We will also use the two components (Customer Name and Account Friendly Name) to identify the Account in all of the Nucleator config files.

The first (and, sometimes, the only) Account created with which Nucleator will be used is often referred to as the "Master" Account.  The Master Account may also be used as a Master Account for AWS Consolidated Billing.

Example Account Names:

• master-47lining
• test1-47lining
• internalcustomer-yourcompany

Account Email Address

AWS requires that each AWS Account must have an independent email address.  You specify the email address for the Account at the time that you create the account, and use the email address to login to the the AWS Console using the Account's "root credentials", which consist of this email address and the the Account's root password.  We suggest using a consistent naming convention for the email addresses associated with AWS Accounts.

At 47Lining, we explicitly create new email forwarders for this purpose, and use the convention:

{{account_name}}.accounts.aws.{{customer_name}}@47lining.com

The convention provides for independent namespaces for multiple IaaS providers, if needed.  In this convention, a consolidated accounts.aws.{{customer_name}}@47lining.com forwarder is established.  This forwarder provides a managed, customer-specific distribution list that applies to all of the purpose-specific AWS Accounts for that customer.  All of the purpose-specific {{account_name}}.accounts.aws.{{customer_name}}@47lining.com addresses for that customer forward to accounts.aws.{{customer_name}}@47lining.com

Example Account Email Addresses:

• master.accounts.aws.47lining@47lining.com
• test1.accounts.aws.47lining@47lining.com
• customers_customer.accounts.aws.distributor_customer@47lining.com

AWS Console Shortcut Link