Create AWS Control Tower resources with AWS CloudFormation

AWS Control Tower is integrated with AWS CloudFormation, a service that helps you to model and set up your AWS resources so that you can spend less time creating and managing your resources and infrastructure. You create a template that describes all the AWS resources that you want, such as AWS::ControlTower::EnabledControl for controls. AWS CloudFormation provisions and configures those resources for you.

When you use AWS CloudFormation, you can reuse your template to set up your AWS Control Tower resources consistently and repeatedly. Describe your resources once, and then provision the same resources over and over in multiple AWS accounts and Regions.

AWS Control Tower and AWS CloudFormation templates

To provision and configure resources for AWS Control Tower and related services, you must understand AWS CloudFormation templates. Templates are formatted text files in JSON or YAML. These templates describe the resources that you want to provision in your AWS CloudFormation stacks. If you're unfamiliar with JSON or YAML, you can use AWS CloudFormation Designer to help you get started with AWS CloudFormation templates. For more information, see What is AWS CloudFormation Designer? in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

AWS Control Tower supports creating AWS::ControlTower::EnabledControl (control resources), AWS::ControlTower::LandingZone (landing zones), and AWS::ControlTower::EnabledBaseline (baselines) in AWS CloudFormation. For more information, including examples of JSON and YAML templates for these resource types, see AWS Control Tower in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

To view some AWS Control Tower examples for the CLI and the console, see Enable controls with AWS CloudFormation.

Learn more about AWS CloudFormation

To learn more about AWS CloudFormation, see the following resources: