If you working on many projects deployed to AWS over time, sometimes it can become more difficult to track what resources are where and what relates to what. Tagging can help a lot, so can regions. For example I can deploy one project to us-west-1 and another to us-west-2.

Another idea is to take advantages of multiple AWS accounts and manage them as an Organization. There’s no additional cost for each account or setting up the Organization, the costs are still only for the resources you are using.

Now you have multiple accounts to segregate various projects or other things you’re working on, instead of logging off one account and logging on to the other and switching back a forth, you can assume a role within other accounts from the Account dropdown and ‘Switch Roles’. This option is only visible if you are signed on as an IAM user and not the root account user.

Before you get to this step, in the account you want to switch to, create a new IAM role with the permissions you need to use, and in the Trust section, add the account id for the other account where you want to assume the role from. The complete the fields above and insert the ARN id for the role.

After the first time you’ve used this switch role feature, you’ll see the role in the Account dropdown to reuse later.

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