Multi-Account Strategy by Environment
Overview
CloudAIPilot supports connecting multiple cloud accounts from the same or different providers into a single organisation. This allows you to manage production, staging, and development infrastructure in one place while keeping them on separate cloud accounts — a common and recommended pattern for isolation.
Why Use Separate Cloud Accounts Per Environment
Running all your environments (production, staging, dev) inside a single cloud account means that a problem in one environment can affect the others — for example, hitting service quotas, unexpected costs from a runaway process, or security incidents that cross environment boundaries.
A common approach is to use separate accounts for each environment:
- Acme Corp — Production (AWS account A)
- Acme Corp — Staging (AWS account B)
You connect both accounts into your CloudAIPilot organisation. When provisioning a server, you select which cloud account to use as the target — so staging servers go to the staging account and production servers go to the production account.
How It Works in CloudAIPilot
When creating a server, the provisioning form asks you to select a cloud account. If you have multiple accounts connected, you choose which one the server should be provisioned in. The same applies when the AI Pilot provisions a server — you can specify or confirm the target cloud account before approving.
This means servers, backups, and monitoring are all scoped to the cloud account they were created under. Servers in different cloud accounts are logically separated within CloudAIPilot as well.
Mixing Providers
You are not limited to one provider. You can connect AWS, GCP, Azure, and DigitalOcean accounts simultaneously in the same CloudAIPilot organisation. This is useful if you use different providers for different workloads or teams.
Recommended Setup
For most teams:
- Use a separate cloud account for production.
- Use one or more accounts for non-production work (staging, dev).
- Connect all accounts to your CloudAIPilot organisation and give them clear display names so they are easy to distinguish (e.g., "Production — AWS US East", "Staging — AWS US East").