Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

What is Amazon Cloud Control API?

Use Amazon Cloud Control API to create, read, update, delete, and list (CRUD-L) your cloud resources that belong to a wide range of Amazon services. With the Cloud Control API standardized set of application programming interfaces (APIs), you can perform CRUD-L operations on any supported resources in your Amazon Web Services account. Using Cloud Control API, you won't have to generate code or scripts specific to each individual service responsible for those resources.

Are you a first-time Cloud Control API user?

If you're a first-time user of Cloud Control API, we recommend that you begin by reading the following sections:

Features of Cloud Control API

Cloud Control API provides you with consistent control over the resources in your Amazon account by offering a standardized way of accessing and provisioning those resources. It provides a uniform programmatic interface for making calls directly to the various resource types available in your Amazon account, without having to be familiarized with the APIs of the underlying web services.

Related services

Similar to Cloud Control API, Amazon CloudFormation also uses resource types to call underlying web services APIs to provision those resources when you place such a request in your account. However, CloudFormation focuses on providing resource management, by treating infrastructure as code. Using CloudFormation, you can author declarative templates that include multiple resources and their dependencies, and then provision those resources as a stack. A stack is a single unit that you then manage through Amazon CloudFormation. You can also centrally manage and provision stacks across multiple Amazon Web Services accounts and Amazon Web Services Regions. To be managed through CloudFormation, a resource must be created as part of a stack or imported into a stack. For more information, see the Amazon CloudFormation User Guide.

Accessing Cloud Control API

Cloud Control API provides API operations for generating create, read, update, delete, and list (CRUD-L) resource requests in addition to tracking and managing those requests. You use the Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI) for Cloud Control API operations.

The following table shows the Cloud Control API operations you can use to generate CRUD-L resource requests.

The following table shows the Cloud Control API operations that you can use to track and manage resource requests while they're in process.