A Landing Zone to take off on a successful Cloud Journey
Faces of Google Cloud Partners
17. September 2022
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By Aravind Kumar Ramaiah Kothandaramaiah, Shivpalsinh Rana and Marcin Czernicki
A Landing Zone to take off on a successful Cloud Journey
Aravind Kumar Ramaiah Kothandaramaiah, Shivpalsinh Rana and Marcin Czernicki from the Accenture Google Cloud Business Group (AGBG) in Austria, Switzerland and Germany (ASG) explain why a solid Cloud Landing Zone (CLZ) is key to a successful Cloud Journey. They also set forth how AGBG ASG guides customers to the right setup with a variety of constantly improved core assets.
The relevance of a solid Landing Zone
In military terminology, a Landing Zone is an infrastructure where the aircrafts can land safely. Similarly, a Cloud Landing Zone (CLZ) – often also referred to as Cloud Foundation – is a baseline foundation which provides a secure, flexible, and pre-configured environment to host and deploy cloud services based on best practices. Generally speaking, a CLZ is the first infrastructure to be built when starting a cloud migration/adoption or implementing services in the cloud.
Every organization is different and has different needs and priorities. Hence, there is no CLZ that fits all. But a well-designed and strategically executed landing zone is the next best thing, providing an organization template for deploying workloads into the cloud. A CLZ typically includes building blocks such as Networking, Security & Compliance, Monitoring, Identity & Access Management (IAM) and Billing. Once set up properly, it enables developers to focus more on creating added value without worrying about infrastructure.
Five core assets for almost every GCP landing zone
As a focus initiatives of our incubator program and central element of our Enterprise Cloud Services offering, the aim of the CLZ initiative is to constantly improve our expertise in building landing zones on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) by bringing in best practices, blueprints such as project plans, build sheets, terraform modules, test suites, how-to-guides and more. Based on our experience from customer projects, we have defined five core assets that play an important role in almost every CLZ scenario:
- Best Practices: Representing the most efficient or smartest approach in a given business situation, best practices are a set of guidelines, ethics, or ideas to get the right answers – even though every customer has specific needs. To be constantly refined by experts, our best practices asset document contains the guidelines and recommendations from Google, AGBG and Wabion, for cloud services that are essential for creating a landing zone on GCP.
- Build Plan: As our “match plan”, the build plan not only enables to track activities (collecting customer information, defining the workstream, IaC development etc.) with due dates, but also provides an overview of all milestones. Based on completed AGBG projects, our build plan asset is a MS Project Gantt chart. It includes tasks, sub-tasks with approximate time needed to finish and sample start/ finish dates that can vary significantly depending on the specific client requirements.
- Build Sheet: This summary for low-level-design contains the details about all the services to be built, promoting transparency, enhancing traceability, and assisting in quality assurance based on appropriate examples for the CLZ. In particular, it will help the IaC team to develop and trace the progress of Terraform code. The hosting team typically uses it as a reference to build the landing zone.
- IaC – Terraform Modules: Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. As the current standard language for IaC, it simplifies the infrastructure provisioning process and should be used in every CLZ project on GCP. In addition to our Terraform modules (scripts), our development guide provides details about the IaC setup and coding standards. It is a living document to be complemented with new modules for GCP based on both the Google Cloud Foundation Toolkit and our project experiences. In addition, automating Terraform with CI/CD enforces configuration best practices, promotes collaboration and automates the Terraform workflow.
- Test Cases: Our test cases document provides detailed information about various test cases, acceptance criteria, test considerations, detailed execution steps, test case results and artifacts. The test strategy document aims to define all the test cases that are required for a test-driven CLZ development.
A good start for every customer
Whether a client is already cloud-savvy, on the way to the cloud or only at the beginning of his journey – CLZ with AGBG ASG based on Google’s best practices offers plenty of flexibility to pick a customer up in his current situation and make sure that the journey continues smoothly and rapidly. In addition to the clean CLZ configuration enabling automation and repeated use of GCP projects, AGBG ASG also takes care of project management and implementation.
Thanks to the completed integration of our Wabion colleagues, we are the leading Google Cloud Partner in Austria, Switzerland and Germany covering the entire Google Cloud offering for both professional services and resale.
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