Landing Zone Automation at Scale

October 4, 2023/Samtek/Comments Off on Landing Zone Automation at Scale

In today’s federal and enterprise cloud environments, scalability, governance, and operational speed are mission-critical. Agencies and enterprises must operationalize hundreds—or even thousands—of Landing Zones quickly, securely, and consistently. Traditional manual approaches to Landing Zone deployment simply cannot meet the demands of modern cloud operations.

What is a Landing Zone?

A Landing Zone is a pre-configured, secure, and compliant cloud environment that provides the foundational infrastructure, governance, security controls, and operational baselines necessary for hosting applications and workloads.
It typically includes account/subscription structures, identity management, network architecture (VPCs, subnets), security monitoring, logging, compliance enforcement, and cost management configurations — ready for immediate, secure use by mission teams.

Landing Zones are essential to ensuring that cloud adoption happens securely, consistently, and at scale across multiple business units or mission programs.

SPA: Transforming Landing Zone Deployment

That’s why Samtek developed Service Provisioning Automation (SPA)—a fully serverless, event-driven orchestration platform that delivers Landing Zone automation at scale.
More than just basic account setup, SPA ties together cloud governance, security, networking, DevSecOps, financial management, and operational readiness—all at the point of tenant creation.

In short: SPA is Landing Zone automation for complex enterprise environments—purpose-built for high-velocity, high-security cloud ecosystems.

Meeting the Business Need for Scalable, Secure Landing Zones

Without a system like SPA, organizations face significant operational risk:

  • Months-long onboarding times for new mission systems
  • Inconsistent governance and compliance enforcement
  • High operational overhead and manual errors
  • Gaps in auditability and security baselines
  • Lack of real-time provisioning transparency

SPA solves these challenges by automating the full Landing Zone lifecycle—from request intake through account validation—while enforcing security, compliance, and operational standards across every environment, every time.

How SPA Works: End-to-End Landing Zone Automation

SPA orchestrates complex Landing Zone provisioning across AWS and Azure environments using a serverless architecture built with:

  • AWS Step Functions for scalable workflow orchestration
  • AWS Lambda for modular, event-driven task execution
  • Amazon API Gateway for request management
  • DynamoDB and Systems Manager Parameter Store for secure state and metadata tracking

Step 1: Tenant Request and Validation via Jira
Landing Zone provisioning starts with a standardized Jira Service Management intake form, where customers submit metadata like project name, business owner, funding information, and required compliance level.
Jira workflows trigger SPA to launch the full Landing Zone provisioning process.

Step 2: Automated Landing Zone Construction and Integration

  • Governance and Account Creation via Kion
    SPA calls Kion, our integrated Cloud Management Platform (CMP), to automate AWS account creation, Azure subscription setup, and Organizational Unit (OU) and Project association.
    Correct cloud policies, budget structures, and compliance frameworks are automatically applied.
  • VPC Provisioning and Network Architecture
    SPA interfaces with the enterprise IPAM system to allocate IP address space, including primary CIDRs for standard workloads and secondary CIDRs dedicated for EKS clusters (Kubernetes networking at scale).
  • Gold Image Sharing and Infrastructure Hardening
    SPA ensures approved gold images are shared with new accounts/subscriptions immediately, enforcing secure, hardened compute environments.
  • CRM System Synchronization
    SPA updates the CRM platform with tenant metadata and status, maintaining synchronization across IT and business management systems.
  • DevSecOps Environment Setup via CloudBees and GitHub
    SPA provisions CI/CD workspaces through CloudBees Core APIs, and automatically creates secure source code repositories in GitHub, applying standardized templates and access controls. SPA automatically integrates all DevSecOps services (CloudBees Core, GitHub, SonarQube, Artifactory etc.) so end-users can hit the ground running as soon as they receive their tenant environment.
  • Active Directory Integration
    SPA dynamically creates Active Directory groups aligned to agency naming conventions, granting role-based access controls to newly provisioned Landing Zones.
  • CSP Tenant Configuration Enforcement
    SPA configures mandatory account/subscription settings such as CloudTrail, Config Rules, encryption policies, and diagnostic settings to meet FedRAMP and FISMA requirements.

Step 3: Continuous Validation and Lifecycle Management

  • Account Validation Pipelines
    SPA triggers post-provisioning security and compliance validation pipelines, confirming Landing Zones meet all security baselines before going operational.
  • Real-Time Notifications and Monitoring Integration
    • Slack alerts notify operational teams of provisioning progress or exceptions.
    • Jira tickets are automatically updated with real-time status and comments.
    • Enterprise monitoring platforms are updated with newly provisioned Landing Zone metadata for visibility and incident response tracking.
  • Self-Healing and Resiliency
    SPA automatically retries failed service calls with exponential backoff, ensuring resilience and minimizing manual intervention.

Why SPA Matters: Scaling Landing Zones Beyond Traditional Limits

Unlike traditional automation, SPA:

  • Handles the full Landing Zone lifecycle, not just initial account setup
  • Enforces multi-layered governance and security standards at provisioning time
  • Accelerates tenant creation from months to hours—even in high-complexity environments
  • Supports thousands of tenants concurrently without manual scaling
  • Delivers audit-ready logs and compliance event generation automatically
  • Reduces operational costs through event-driven, serverless execution models

SPA makes it possible to operationalize secure, compliant, and fully governed Landing Zones—at scale, with speed, and with full auditability.

Real-World Impact

SPA currently provisions and manages Landing Zones for some of the largest and most complex federal and enterprise cloud environments.
It integrates governance (Kion), security (baseline validation), networking (IPAM/VPC automation), identity (Active Directory automation), DevSecOps enablement (CloudBees and GitHub), monitoring (enterprise tool integration), and operational transparency (Slack, Jira) into a single cohesive system.

By automating every critical step of Landing Zone deployment, SPA ensures agencies and enterprises can:

  • Support rapid mission delivery
  • Enhance cybersecurity readiness
  • Improve operational transparency
  • Optimize costs
  • Meet federal audit standards with confidence

At Samtek, we are redefining Landing Zone automation for the enterprise cloud—delivering secure, compliant, and production-ready environments at massive scale, with zero manual touch.

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