Managing AWS Config Rules Across All Accounts in Your Organization

AWS Config allows you to manage AWS Config rules across all AWS accounts within an organization. You can:

Considerations

For deployments across different regions

The API call to deploy rules and conformance packs across accounts is AWS Region specific. At the organization level, you need to change the context of your API call to a different region if you want to deploy rules in other regions. For example, to deploy a rule in US East (N. Virginia), change the region to US East (N. Virginia) and then call PutOrganizationConfigRule.

For accounts within an organization

If a new account joins an organization, the rule or conformance pack is deployed to that account. When an account leaves an organization, the rule or conformance pack is removed.

If you deploy an organizational rule or conformance pack in an organization administrator account, and then establish a delegated administrator and deploy an organizational rule or conformance pack in the delegated administrator account, you won't be able to see the organizational rule or conformance pack in the organization administrator account from the delegated administrator account or see the organizational rule or conformance pack in the delegated administrator account from organization administrator account. The DescribeOrganizationConfigRules and DescribeOrganizationConformancePacks APIs can only see and interact with the organization-related resource that were deployed from within the account calling those APIs.

Retry mechanism for new accounts added to an organization

Deployment of existing organizational rules and conformance packs will only be retried for 7 hours after an account is added to your organization if a recorder is not available. You are expected to create a recorder if one doesn't exist within 7 hours of adding an account to your organization.

Organization management accounts, delegated administrators, and service-linked roles

If you are using an organization management account and intend to use a delegated administrator for organizational deployment, be aware that AWS Config won't automatically create the service-linked role (SLR). You must manually create the service-linked role (SLR) separately using IAM.

If you do not have an SLR for your management account, you will not be able to deploy resources to that account from a delegated administrator account. You will still be able to deploy AWS Config rules to member accounts from management and delegated administrator accounts. For more information, see Using service-linked roles in the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) User Guide.

Deployment

For information on how to integrate AWS Config with AWS Organizations, see AWS Config and AWS Organizations in the AWS Organizations User Guide. Ensure AWS Config recording is on before you use the following APIs to manage AWS Config rules across all AWS accounts within an organization:

Region Support

Deploying AWS Config Rules across member accounts in an AWS Organization is supported in the following Regions.