And from minute 36 onward, the console where you operate, audit and measure every tenant — every day, not just the first one. Control Plane deploys inside your own AWS account.
The process that takes you three days today. Zero manual steps.
Scaling customers shouldn't mean scaling your infrastructure team. Every multi-tenant SaaS has to create accounts, deploy infrastructure, configure applications, control access, measure cost and audit changes. The question isn't whether you have a control plane — it's whether it's a system, or a set of scripts, spreadsheets and one person's memory.
The Organizations console, CloudFormation templates copied by hand, workflows triggered repo by repo, migrations run from someone's laptop.
Days of engineering for every new customer. And configuration mistakes that surface in production.
No formal tenant state, no history, no controlled way to suspend or reactivate a customer.
Nobody knows the real state without asking a person. And that person can leave.
AWS billing arrives consolidated, and per-tenant margin is estimated from a historical average.
Margin erodes quietly — exactly on the accounts that matter most.
AWS defines it this way in SaaS Architecture Fundamentals: every SaaS solution splits into an application plane — the multi-tenant functionality your customers use — and a control plane: the services that onboard, authenticate, manage, operate and analyze that environment. AWS is explicit that the control plane is foundational to any SaaS model, regardless of how you deploy or isolate your application.
The application plane is where all your product effort goes, because it's what the customer sees. The control plane is your business's infrastructure — and building it properly takes quarters of engineering that add nothing to your product.
The list isn't ours. It's the standard you can hold any alternative to — including building it yourself.
| Core service | What it actually means | What happens without it |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | Bringing a full tenant online: create its account, deploy its infrastructure, ship your applications. | Every new customer is a manual project measured in days. |
| Tenant | The registry and lifecycle of each tenant: state, tier, configuration, suspension, history. | The source of truth is a spreadsheet and one person's memory. |
| Identity | The relationship between a user and the tenant they belong to; tenant-aware authentication. | Isolation depends on nobody ever misconfiguring anything. |
| Admin users | Your own team operating the platform, with segregated roles and permissions. | Everyone operates with full access to the AWS console. |
| Billing | Metering real consumption per tenant and turning it into invoicing or tiering decisions. | You charge a flat fee and absorb every variation yourself. |
| Metrics | Per-tenant business metrics: usage, adoption, activity. The signal of who is growing and who is leaving. | You learn about churn when the cancellation email arrives. |
One for each core service in the reference model, plus the one that makes the console yours. Automated onboarding is the most visible result — it isn't the only one.
Each step runs on a state machine dedicated to your instance, and its progress shows in the console while it happens.
Control Tower Account Factory creates the account in the right OU, inside your own organization.
Terraform through Service Catalog stands up network, roles, database and base resources. No direct access to the tenant account.
The pipeline triggers your own CI/CD workflows through their API. Agnostic to your Git provider.
It goes live in the system with state, tier and traceability from the first minute.
The admin gets confirmation — and watched every step in real time while it ran.
Pipelines fail. What matters is what's left behind. If the failure happens before the account is created, the process rolls back clean. If it happens after, the account moves automatically into a quarantine organizational unit, the tenant is marked orphaned, and the admin gets an alert naming the exact step that failed. You never end up with live AWS accounts billing without a customer attached.
The platform deploys through Terraform into a dedicated account inside your own AWS Organization. Tenant accounts are created in your organization, not ours.
Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB and Step Functions. Continuous availability, no servers to maintain, no maintenance windows.
Mandatory MFA for administrators, authorization checked on every request, secrets with scheduled rotation, and no static credentials in repositories.
Every console action lands in the audit log; every AWS API call lands in CloudTrail — with actor, timestamp and affected resource.
You manage your users and your configuration from handover day. Our access is temporary and granted at your explicit request.
Nothing shared between customers: state machine, IAM roles and observability isolated per instance.
Creating a new tenant took a full dedicated workday. In practice, three days on average — the person doing it kept getting pulled into other work. Demo environments for prospects competed for that same time.
Under 35 minutes, triggered by an admin from the console, with no involvement from the engineering team.
At three new tenants a month, that's roughly eight engineering days freed up every month — going back into the product instead of into infrastructure.
Thirty minutes, no cost. We review how you provision today and confirm whether the model fits your architecture.
We map your applications, your CI/CD pipeline and your account structure. Output: scope, timeline and concrete prerequisites.
We install the platform in your account, configured with your brand, your app catalog and your pipeline.
You get the admin user, team training and documentation. From there, you operate it.
AWS Control Tower enabled, AWS Organizations configured, and your deployment workflows reachable through an API. If you don't have them yet, sorting that out is part of the assessment.
You can. It's several quarters of engineering — pipeline, console, authentication, audit, failure handling, infrastructure as code — that add nothing to your product. The question isn't whether your team is capable: it's whether that's the best use of your team for the next six months.
Control Plane doesn't replace Control Tower, Service Catalog or Step Functions — it orchestrates them. What we deliver is the layer AWS doesn't hand you built: the operations console, the tenant state model, failure handling, the audit trail and white-labeling.
Not permanently. The platform deploys in your account and you operate it. Our access is temporary and granted at your explicit request.
The current version is built for account-level isolation. If your model is different, let's work through it in the diagnostic before you invest time.
A setup fee per implementation plus a subscription per active tenant. Scope and figures are defined in the diagnostic, based on your tenant volume and the number of applications to deploy.
Thirty minutes. We review your current process and tell you plainly whether this is worth it for you. Conversations in English or Spanish.
Built by Applying Consulting, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner in Peru, Colombia and Chile. Control Plane started by solving a real problem for a SaaS customer that couldn't grow at the pace of its own sales pipeline.