Our agency has transitioned six major systems into our cloud infrastructure in Amazon Web Services, resulting in 20+ AWS linked accounts and 1 organization. We started in 2015 with only 1 standalone AWS account. How’d we grow to so many accounts in 5 years? Why’d we do it? Come learn about how our agency conceived of an “Islands in the Sky” model for system management in the cloud. We’ll discuss the importance of limiting your blast radius, the benefits of the AWS IAM model, the pain points of setting up cross account access properly, and how we learned to manage these things over time.