Operations Management

Building a Multi-Account Environment with AWS Control Tower - Landing Zone and Guardrails

Establish governance for your multi-account environment with automated landing zone construction and guardrail-based policy enforcement. Also covers automated account creation with Account Factory.

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The Role of Control Tower

Control Tower is a service that automatically builds and manages AWS multi-account environments. It creates accounts with Organizations, applies policies with SCPs, monitors compliance with Config, and aggregates logs with CloudTrail, all automatically set up as a landing zone. A multi-account best-practice configuration that would take days to build manually can be completed in just a few hours with Control Tower.

Designing Guardrails

Over 400 guardrails are provided across three tiers: mandatory, strongly recommended, and elective. Preventive guardrails are implemented as SCPs and proactively block prohibited actions. Examples include "prevent changes to CloudTrail settings in the log archive account" and "restrict regions (block operations in unauthorized regions)." Detective guardrails are implemented as Config rules and detect non-compliant configurations with notifications. Examples include "EBS volumes are not encrypted" and "S3 buckets are publicly accessible." Proactive guardrails are implemented as CloudFormation hooks and block the creation of non-compliant resources before they are provisioned.

Account Factory and Customization

Account Factory is an account creation feature integrated with Service Catalog. When developers request an account through self-service, a new account with standardized settings (VPC, subnets, security groups, IAM roles) is automatically provisioned in minutes. Using Customizations for Control Tower (CfCT), you can automatically apply custom CloudFormation templates during account creation. This automates tasks like installing security tools, configuring monitoring agents, and creating standard IAM roles, ensuring a consistent configuration across all accounts. To deepen your operational knowledge of Control Tower, specialized books (Amazon) are a great resource.

Control Tower Pricing

Control Tower itself incurs no additional charges. Costs come from the AWS services that Control Tower uses internally (Organizations, Config, CloudTrail, S3, SNS). Detective guardrails are implemented as Config rules, so Config evaluation charges (approximately $0.003 per evaluation) apply. Config costs increase with the number of guardrails and accounts, so selectively enable only the guardrails you need rather than enabling all of them uniformly. The VPC and subnet configurations created by Account Factory also affect costs, so minimizing unnecessary automatic resource creation is recommended.

Summary

Control Tower automates the setup and governance of multi-account environments. It automatically builds a best-practice configuration with a landing zone, enforces security policies with guardrails, and standardizes account creation with Account Factory. It is an essential foundation as your organization's AWS usage grows.

Related Services

AWS Control TowerA service that automates multi-account environment setup and governanceAWS OrganizationsA service for centrally managing multiple AWS accountsAWS ConfigA service that records and evaluates AWS resource configuration changes and continuously monitors compliance

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