Welcome - AWS Control Tower

Welcome

These interfaces allow you to apply the AWS library of pre-defined controls to your organizational units, programmatically. In this context, controls are the same as AWS Control Tower guardrails.

To call these APIs, you'll need to know:

  • the ControlARN for the control--that is, the guardrail--you are targeting,

  • and the ARN associated with the target organizational unit (OU).

To get the ControlARN for your AWS Control Tower guardrail:

The ControlARN contains the control name which is specified in each guardrail. For a list of control names for Strongly recommended and Elective guardrails, see Resource identifiers for APIs and guardrails in the Automating tasks section of the AWS Control Tower User Guide. Remember that Mandatory guardrails cannot be added or removed.

Note

ARN format: arn:aws:controltower:{REGION}::control/{CONTROL_NAME}

Example:

arn:aws:controltower:us-west-2::control/AWS-GR_AUTOSCALING_LAUNCH_CONFIG_PUBLIC_IP_DISABLED

To get the ARN for an OU:

In the AWS Organizations console, you can find the ARN for the OU on the Organizational unit details page associated with that OU.

Note

OU ARN format:

arn:${Partition}:organizations::${MasterAccountId}:ou/o-${OrganizationId}/ou-${OrganizationalUnitId}

Details and examples

To view the open source resource repository on GitHub, see aws-cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-resource-providers-controltower

Recording API Requests

AWS Control Tower supports AWS CloudTrail, a service that records AWS API calls for your AWS account and delivers log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. By using information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine which requests the AWS Control Tower service received, who made the request and when, and so on. For more about AWS Control Tower and its support for CloudTrail, see Logging AWS Control Tower Actions with AWS CloudTrail in the AWS Control Tower User Guide. To learn more about CloudTrail, including how to turn it on and find your log files, see the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.

This document was last published on March 25, 2023.