# Application OUs
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## Workloads OU
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 The Workloads OU is intended to house most of your business-specific workloads including both production and non-production environments. These workloads can be a mix of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications and your own internally developed custom applications and data services. 

 Workloads in this OU often include shared application and data services that are used by other workloads. 

### Example structure
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 The following example represents a basic structure in which sets of workloads owned by diverse business units or teams reside in two child OUs: Prod and Test. In this example, a common governance and operating model applies across those areas. The data-lake-prod account shown in this example contains data services that are shared with other production workloads and accounts. 

 For general guidance on separating production and non-production workloads and resources, refer to [Organizing workload-oriented OUs](advanced-ous.md#organizing-workload-oriented-ous). 

![\[Diagram showing example structure of Workloads OU\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/organizing-your-aws-environment/images/example-workloads-ou.png)