Azure Multi Subscription Landing Zone - 6 Tips and Solutions for Cloud Architects and DevOps

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuBEMpJsK4g&t=260s

As cloud architects or/and DevOps, we are familiar with the challenges of using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to manage our infrastructure. Maintaining updated versions of IaC templates and modules, writing comprehensive documentation, testing the reliability and consistency of IaC code, collaborating effectively with team members, ensuring compliance with security and regulatory requirements, optimizing performance, debugging and troubleshooting efficiently, and integrating with other tools are just a few of the many challenges we face every day.

It's not just about writing the IaC code, but also about ensuring that it is well-documented, tested, and versioned. This requires a lot of effort, especially when working with complex infrastructure. Keeping track of changes and ensuring that everyone on the team is on the same page can be a real headache. And that's not to mention the need to ensure that the infrastructure being provisioned is secure, reliable, and scalable. This requires the use of best practices for infrastructure design and the continuous monitoring of infrastructure for potential security risks or performance issues.

In addition, there is also the challenge of ensuring that infrastructure provisioning is cost-effective. This involves selecting the appropriate cloud provider and services and implementing cost-saving measures such as auto-scaling and resource optimization.

These challenges can be time-consuming and demanding, but they are essential to ensuring the reliability and consistency of our infrastructure.

Here are 6 best practices that you can put in place to overcome them:

1. Centralize the design and the Terraform code to have a faithful representation of the infrastructure
2. Improve documentation by writing and maintaining comprehensive documentation for all your infrastructures
3. Work on a collaborative platform for managing and sharing infrastructures, making coordinating changes easier and ensuring everyone is using the latest version.
4. Create standards & best practices that are automatically used at the design level
5. Integrate open-source tools when you design your CI/CD workflows to make sure that cloud infrastructures meet the necessary security and budget requirements.
6. Build self-service Infrastructures to enable other team members to easily provision infrastructure on-demand with a library of templates and modules