Nuvibit AWS Reference Architecture
Introduction
The Nuvibit AWS Reference Architecture (NARA) is the result of years of experience in building best-in-class AWS foundations and landing zones. Refined and optimized through numerous iterations in real-world projects, this battle-tested framework now provides a reliable, scalable and secure solution for managing enterprise-grade AWS environments.
Tailored to meet the needs of modern organizations, NARA addresses critical challenges such as cloud governance, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance. By focusing on scalability, reliability, and security, it empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of AWS while safeguarding sensitive workloads and maintaining governance.
At the core of this architecture lies the Nuvibit Terraform Collection (NTC), a suite of modular, enterprise-grade building blocks. These building blocks streamline the implementation of the reference architecture, automating complex tasks such as account provisioning, connectivity, security tooling, and compliance management. With NARA and NTC, organizations can confidently rely on a proven framework designed to accelerate cloud adoption, enforce best practices, and enable long-term operational excellence.
Core Principles
Scalability
The Nuvibit AWS Reference Architecture (NARA) ensures scalability by organizing the AWS environment into a structured multi-account framework. This approach allows organizations to scale horizontally by adding new accounts for specific workloads, environments, or teams, and vertically by expanding resources within individual accounts as needed. With integrated automation for provisioning, lifecycle management, and account baselining, organizations can seamlessly adjust their infrastructure to meet evolving business demands while maintaining control and efficiency.
Enterprise-Grade
Enterprise-grade reliability lies at the core of the NARA design. This is achieved through the deliberate segregation of critical functionalities into dedicated accounts, ensuring operational isolation and minimizing risk. By compartmentalizing workloads, connectivity, and security operations, the architecture ensures that issues, such as misconfigurations or failures in one account, do not cascade across the entire organization. This isolation strategy is bolstered by centralized logging, monitoring, and security tooling, providing comprehensive visibility and control. The result is a robust and resilient foundation that safeguards the stability and availability of critical services, supporting uninterrupted operations and rapid issue resolution.
Compliance
Designed for highly regulated industries, NARA integrates governance, customizable guardrails, and automated compliance features to meet stringent industry standards such as ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA. Centralized security tooling, log archiving, and fine-grained access controls ensure consistent enforcement of policies across all accounts. By aligning with AWS best practices and providing built-in compliance capabilities, NARA enables organizations to confidently operate within regulatory frameworks while maintaining full sovereignty over their data.
Accelerated Cloud Adoption
With pre-configured building blocks provided by the Nuvibit Terraform Collection (NTC), NARA removes the complexities and delays of manual configurations. These modular building blocks automate key tasks like account provisioning, networking setup, and compliance enforcement, enabling organizations to quickly establish a secure and scalable AWS foundation. By streamlining cloud adoption, NARA empowers teams to focus on innovation and deliver value at a faster pace.
Core Accounts
Core accounts are the cornerstone of a multi-account AWS environment, supporting governance, security, and operational efficiency. These accounts are essential for creating a scalable, secure, and well-governed AWS organization. Some accounts are highly recommended, while others can be implemented based on specific organizational requirements.
Organization Management Account
The Organization Management Account serves as the operational backbone for managing and governing all AWS accounts within the organization. It enables the configuration of AWS Organizations, which allows defining a hierarchical structure of accounts and the enforcement of guardrails for consistent and centralized governance.
Example of an AWS organizational structure:
This centralized management streamlines tasks such as configuring account baselines (e.g. setting up foundational infrastructure, defining budget alerts) and implementing account lifecycle customizations (e.g. removing default VPCs, enabling opt-in regions).
Optional integration with AWS Control Tower adds further governance by providing pre-configured guardrails and best practices for multi-account setups. The Nuvibit Terraform Collection (NTC) complements AWS Control Tower by filling gaps, such as advanced security tooling, automated identity management, and multi-account connectivity, ensuring a comprehensive and seamless solution.
This account is crucial for maintaining consistency, simplifying administration, and ensuring effective governance across the organization. By centralizing these governance capabilities, the Organization Management Account simplifies administrative overhead, enforces consistency, and ensures robust governance across the entire AWS environment.
NTC Building Blocks to streamline the deployment and management of the Organization Management Account:
Log Archive Account
The Log Archive Account provides centralized S3 buckets for securely storing logging and audit data generated across all AWS accounts in the organization. Services such as CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, GuardDuty and AWS Config can be configured to forward their logs to this account, ensuring a centralized and comprehensive audit trail for compliance, troubleshooting, and monitoring purposes.
Audit logs are encrypted using AWS KMS to maintain their confidentiality and integrity. By consolidating logs from multiple accounts, this account plays a vital role in achieving regulatory compliance requirements, and in facilitating detailed forensic analysis in the event of a security incident. Its role in maintaining a centralized and secure log repository makes it indispensable for ensuring operational transparency and regulatory adherence.
NTC Building Blocks to streamline the deployment and management of the Log Archive Account:
- NTC Log Archive
- NTC Organizations (organization trail)
Security Tooling Account
The Security Tooling Account is a dedicated environment to centralize and manage security services across the AWS organization. It acts as a focal point for compliance monitoring, analyzing, and enforcing security policies, providing a robust foundation for identifying and mitigating threats.
This account aggregates security findings in AWS Security Hub, offering a unified view of the organization’s security posture. By integrating with tools such as AWS Config for resource compliance, GuardDuty for threat detection, and Inspector for vulnerability management, it ensures comprehensive coverage of potential security risks. Additionally, IAM Access Analyzer helps identify overly permissive roles and policies, enabling administrators to address access-related vulnerabilities proactively.
The Security Tooling Account is essential for protecting sensitive data, maintaining compliance, and strengthening the organization’s defense against an ever-evolving threat landscape. Its central role ensures that security services and policies operate seamlessly across all accounts, contributing to a secure and resilient AWS environment.
NTC Building Blocks to streamline the deployment and management of the Security Tooling Account:
- NTC Security Tooling
- NTC Organizations (admin delegations)
Connectivity Account
The Connectivity Account is dedicated to managing the organization’s central networking infrastructure, ensuring secure and reliable connectivity between AWS accounts, regions, and on-premises environments.
Key components of the Connectivity Account include AWS Transit Gateway for interconnecting VPCs and regions, AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN for secure access to on-premises environments, Amazon Route 53 for DNS configurations, and AWS Network Firewall for centralized traffic inspection and filtering.
While centralizing network management simplifies governance and reduces operational complexity, not all networking components need to be centralized. The Connectivity Account can work in conjunction with decentralized networking elements, such as VPC-specific configurations managed directly within workload accounts. This hybrid approach allows for greater flexibility, enabling teams to expand and customize their network infrastructure while maintaining core security and connectivity standards.
This approach ensures that traffic is routed securely and efficiently, supporting both single-region and multi-region deployments. The Connectivity Account plays a critical role in maintaining a robust, adaptable, and scalable network infrastructure for the organization.
NTC Building Blocks to streamline the deployment and management of the Connectivity Account:
Monitoring Account (optional)
The Monitoring Account serves as a centralized hub for monitoring and observability within the AWS environment. It is particularly useful for consolidating application metrics, logs, and traces generated across multiple accounts into a unified view. Services such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, and third-party integrations for tools like Prometheus and Grafana can be deployed in this account to manage monitoring at scale.
By separating monitoring into a dedicated account, organizations can isolate monitoring-related permissions and ensure that observability data is securely managed. This account becomes especially important for organizations that rely on AWS-native tools for monitoring or require a single-pane-of-glass view of their infrastructure's health and performance. However, if external tools like Splunk or Datadog are preferred, this account may not be necessary.
NTC Building Blocks to streamline the deployment and management of the Monitoring Account:
- NTC Observability (coming soon)
Backup Account (optional)
The Backup Account is a dedicated environment for managing and securing backups of critical data and resources. It provides a centralized location for AWS Backup services to orchestrate and automate the backup of data across all AWS accounts, ensuring compliance with recovery objectives and minimizing data loss in case of failure.
This account can host encrypted backups of services such as Amazon S3, EBS volumes, and Databases, creating an additional layer of data protection. By isolating backup management in its own account, organizations can implement robust security policies, limit access to sensitive backup data, and reduce the risk of accidental deletion or modification.
For organizations using external backup tools such as Veeam or Cohesity, this account might not be required. However, for those relying on AWS-native solutions, a Backup Account is an essential part of a resilient disaster recovery strategy.
NTC Building Blocks to streamline the deployment and management of the Backup Account:
- NTC Backup (coming soon)
Workload Accounts: Dedicated Accounts for Each Stage
The Nuvibit AWS Reference Architecture emphasizes the importance of separating workloads and workload stages into dedicated AWS accounts. This approach enhances security, operational efficiency, and governance while aligning with AWS’s best practices.
Security and Isolation
By isolating workloads into separate accounts, the architecture ensures that incidents or configuration errors in one account do not affect others. For example, critical production workloads are isolated from development and sandbox environments, minimizing the risk of accidental disruptions.
Customizable Guardrails
Guardrails (e.g. Service Control Policies) can be tailored to each account type. Production accounts typically have stricter guardrails to enforce compliance and prevent risky actions, while development accounts allow more flexibility for experimentation. Sandbox accounts provide the freedom to test new AWS services and rapid prototyping without risks, making them ideal for research and innovation.
Cost and Resource Management
Separating workloads by stage simplifies cost tracking and allocation. Each account can have its own budget and quotas, ensuring that resources are used efficiently and within defined limits. As a result, this enables fine-grained billing without having to implement complex tagging policies for cost allocation.
Scalability and Lifecycle Management
Dedicated accounts make it easier to scale workloads independently and manage their lifecycle. For example, sandbox accounts can be easily decommissioned when no longer needed, while production accounts can scale vertically or horizontally without impacting other environments.
Account Baseline
Establishing a consistent account baseline ensures that all newly created accounts adhere to organizational governance standards. This includes pre-configured security settings, connectivity configurations, and log forwarding. An account baseline simplifies onboarding and ensures compliance even as the number of accounts grows into the hundreds.
Customizing the Architecture
The Nuvibit AWS Reference Architecture (NARA) is designed with scalability, security, and compliance at its core, making it an ideal choice for enterprises in regulated sectors (e.g. governments). However, its flexibility allows it to be tailored to meet the unique needs of various industries and organizations through customizations.
Scalability for Growing Startups
Rapidly growing startups can leverage this architecture to establish a resilient foundation that scales effortlessly with their evolving needs. Its modular design ensures that as teams and workloads expand, the infrastructure remains manageable and robust. Dedicated workload accounts simplify scaling while maintaining strong security and governance.
Segmentation for ISVs
Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and managed service providers benefit from the architecture’s ability to segment customer environments into dedicated accounts. This approach ensures strict data separation, reduces cross-environment risks, and simplifies resource tracking. It also supports contractual and regulatory requirements for customer data isolation.
Compliance and Security for Financial Institutions
For financial institutions in regulated industries, the architecture offers comprehensive compliance and security features. Centralized logging, robust guardrails, and automated security tooling address key regulatory requirements. With targeted customization, organizations can meet finance-specific standards such as FINMA or GDPR by closing any remaining compliance gaps.
Adaptability Across Industries
Although initially designed for regulated sectors, the architecture is highly adaptable to different industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, and utilities. Organizations can extend or modify configurations to align with their specific operational and compliance needs while maintaining scalability and security.
Tailored to Your Needs
Nuvibit’s expertise ensures that this architecture can be customized to precisely meet your organization’s requirements. Whether you are scaling a startup, isolating customer environments, or achieving compliance with industry-specific regulations, Nuvibit delivers a cloud platform tailored to your operational goals.
The Nuvibit Terraform Collection (NTC) Building Blocks are designed for flexibility, enabling you to design and implement an architecture that aligns perfectly with your needs.
Benefits of the Nuvibit AWS Reference Architecture
The Nuvibit AWS Reference Architecture (NARA) simplifies cloud management by centralizing governance and automating repetitive tasks. By leveraging AWS Organizations combined with guardrails, administrators can enforce compliance policies across all accounts with minimal effort. This reduces the administrative burden and ensures that the entire environment operates within those predefined guardrails.
With security as a top priority, the architecture isolates workloads into dedicated accounts and implements robust protections such as automated baselines, centralized logging, and integrated security tooling. These features provide strong defenses against potential threats while maintaining visibility and control.
Operational efficiency is another key benefit of this architecture. Pre-configured modules and automated workflows streamline the deployment and management of resources, enabling organizations to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance.
Finally, the architecture’s compliance and sovereignty features ensure that organizations can meet regulatory requirements without sacrificing agility. Centralized log storage, customizable guardrails, and AWS KMS encryption provide the tools needed to maintain data sovereignty and align with industry standards.
Conclusion
The Nuvibit AWS Reference Architecture (NARA) represents a transformative approach to cloud management, combining scalability, reliability, and compliance into a cohesive framework. By leveraging the Nuvibit Terraform Collection (NTC), organizations can confidently accelerate their AWS cloud adoption while ensuring governance, scalability, and compliance for the future of their digital transformation.
For a step-by-step guide to implementing this architecture, refer to the Quickstart Guide and kickstart your cloud journey with the Nuvibit Terraform Collection (NTC).