Decommissioning a landing zone
A landing zone is a foundational environment that is created to help organizations set up and manage a secure, multi-account AWS environment. A landing zone provides a pre-defined set of policies, guardrails, and best practices that help ensure that all AWS accounts in the environment are set up in a secure and compliant manner.
The landing zone is typically set up using AWS Control Tower, which is a service that automates the setup and management of a landing zone. When you set up a landing zone, you can specify a variety of configuration options, such as networking settings, identity and access management (IAM) policies, logging and monitoring settings, and security controls.
The benefits of using a landing zone include:
- Security: Landing zones are set up with a pre-defined set of policies and guardrails that help ensure that all accounts in the environment are set up in a secure and compliant manner.
- Efficiency: Landing zones help streamline the process of setting up and managing a multi-account environment, by providing a pre-configured environment that can be easily replicated.
- Governance: Landing zones provide a centralized location for managing security, compliance, and other governance-related concerns across multiple AWS accounts.
Decommissioning a landing zone involves dismantling the foundational environment that was created when you set up AWS Control Tower. Before decommissioning your landing zone, it’s important to ensure that you have a plan for migrating your existing resources and data to a new environment, and that you have taken steps to back up any important data.
To decommission your landing zone, follow these general steps:
Remove any dependencies on your landing zone: Before you can decommission your landing zone, you will need to ensure that there are no dependencies on your existing resources or services.
Migrate your resources: You will need to migrate any resources that you want to keep to a new environment, either in a different AWS account or with a different landing zone. This may involve exporting and importing data, using AWS services like AWS CloudFormation, or transferring data between regions.
Disable and delete your landing zone: Once you have completed your migration, you can disable and delete your landing zone. This will remove all of the resources and settings associated with your landing zone, and will permanently delete your AWS Control Tower environment.
Clean up any remaining resources: After decommissioning a landing zone, it is important to ensure that all resources and services associated with the landing zone have been fully removed, to avoid incurring unnecessary charges. Here are some general steps to follow after decommissioning a landing zone:
Verify that all resources have been deleted: Check that all resources in each account, including VPCs, EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and IAM roles and policies, have been deleted. If any resources remain, delete them manually.
Check for lingering resources: Some resources may not be associated with any account, but may still be associated with the landing zone. Check for any such lingering resources, and delete them if they are no longer needed.
Ensure that data has been backed up: Before decommissioning a landing zone, ensure that all data has been backed up, and that it is easily accessible in the event that it needs to be restored.
Archive important data: If any data needs to be retained for compliance or other reasons, archive it in a secure location.
Monitor billing: Keep an eye on billing to ensure that no unexpected charges are being incurred, and to verify that all charges associated with the landing zone have been fully removed.
Overall, decommissioning your landing zone requires careful planning and execution to ensure that your data is backed up and that your resources are migrated to a new environment without interruption.
