AWS finally updated AWS console to allow differentiating the AWS accounts by colour. Oh! what do I mean. Well, if you work in cloud environments, you probably work with multiple AWS accounts. More often than not, the accounts are setup for development, test, production and other types of environments. Most companies will have separate accounts for different environments.
With options to login to multiple accounts, it is always a pain to know which account I have logged in to. Yes, you can see the AWS account on the top right, but who remembers the account id, right. I am still waiting to see the account name somewhere to easily identify the account.
Well, until that happens, AWS recently released an option called AWS User Experience Customization (UXC) that lets you set the colour of the account. At least, you can set the colour of the account, like production (red), development (blue), etc to whatever makes sense in your business, That way, you won't accidentally override a setting in production environment thinking you have logged in to development.
How to enable UXC?
So, how can you set the colour. Well, it's no fun, you need to give yourself or the administrator permissions to apply the colour using IAM. You can give yourself the AWSManagementConsoleAdministratorAccess permission that lets you customise the colours for the account. Then, once you have logged in to the account, you can go top dropdown under account name > Account > Account display settings > and set the colour.
How does UXC look like?
Here's a screen shot.
What's not good about UXC Setting?
The setting itself is ok and it is easy to set it. However, you also need IAM permissions to be able to see the colour. That's not great. It means you will need to update every single SSO roles and users that has access to AWS with the IAM, otherwise, they will not see the colour.
So, to enable everyone else to see the colour, you need to add AWSManagementConsoleBasicUserAccess IAM policy to their permissions. That's it but it needs to be done.
I feel this should be a default setting to be able to see the colour. It's read-only, not overwriting previous settings, and it's some kind of safeguard. What do you think?
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