Minimum Viable Landing Zone

Get started safely and fast with our adaptable Landing Zone Package.

Our Custom Solution for You

Our adaptable Landing Zone Package allows you to get started without being bogged down by expensive (and noisy) things that you don’t need, or running the risk of losing time and energy due to their complicated configuration.

Ready to go in 90 days

Don’t lose precious time and resources; get started within 90 days and dive right in.

Get what you really need

Pre-configured Landing Zones are often cluttered with expensive, useless things. We supply you with what you truly need.

In good hands

New cloud environments need a certain level of skill and in-depth knowledge. Leave the difficult part to us!

Interested in Getting Started With GCP?

Are you planning to start working with the Google Cloud Platform and think about:

How to set up GCP correctly, right from the start?
How can I make sure my GCP solution is compliant to the company requirements?
How to get started quickly with GCP?

Ready to Go in 90 Days

Together with you, Hoverture builds your compliant landing zone, based on best practices.
No worries anymore about the operational parts like networking, you can focus on the deployment of your apps. Within 90 days you have a solid, compliant, and secure starting point which is the baseline for your cloud journey.

Then let us help you to bring some traction on the road

To get started, you need the foundation of GCP to build upon. This foundation is called the landing zone. The landing zone is the starting point for every GCP-user.

In this environment we demonstrate a standard onfiguration of a Landing Zone as we provide it for our customers. It is created entirely from code and can therefore be replicated very easily and deleted in case of problems.

In the cloud world, your cloud environment looks pretty similar to the empty data center. If you buy a new one it’s packed full of expensive (and noisy) things that do not do a lot except converting energy into heat. So you have to set up your access control, networks, configure storage systems, install an operating system, bring up VMs, and more. This is not only time-consuming, but it also requires quite some knowledge (who remembers the difference between raid 10 and 01?).

You have to take care of the same things just at a different level of abstraction. To simplify your take-off, the concept of a minimal viable landing zone came to play.

Elements Covered in the GCP Foundation

Due to the nature of such cloud foundation projects with an agreed amount of funded person-days available and limited initial knowledge about company specific guidelines, tools and processes, our recommendation is to start with the development of a functional Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The next iteration then expands it to fit more individual requirements and policies.

Single Sign On

User Portal Service

Billing

Account Baselining

Admin Console

Cloud

Landing GCP

Security

Shared

Network

Op Management

Monitoring

Comp Gov

Community

Benefits

Discover how our solution can facilitate your business processes.

1. GCP

We are a GCP specialized partner focused on GCP Infrastructure

2. Side by side

We work side by side with you to make sure you understand your landing zone

3. Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the heart and soul of the company. We have plenty of experience with it

4. Agile

We work agile and transparent

touch down.

Recently we finished another landing zone project and want to share some learnings.
But first, we probably need to explain what we are talking about.

minimal viable landing zone

Google came up with the idea of packaging the basic structure of a GCP environment as a minimal viable landing zone to avoid bringing PoCs to production. Great idea as we saw in our projects with customers that the starting point was often already in a state that was hard to maintain. The complexity of a cloud environment is high and users can feel overwhelmed taking their first steps on GCP.

I usually compare public cloud environments to data centers. If you buy a new one it’s packed full of expensive (and noisy) things that do not do a lot except converting energy into heat. So you have to set up your access control, networks, configure storage systems, install an operating system, bring up VMs, and more. This is not only time-consuming, but it also requires quite some knowledge (who remembers the difference between raid 10 and 01?).

In the cloud world, your cloud environment looks pretty similar to the empty data center. You have to take care of the same things just at a different level of abstraction. To simplify your take-off, the concept of a minimal viable landing zone came to play.

It’s an environment based on best practices that are created together with the customer, supported by a google cloud partner (like us ???? ) so the customer can look into the deployment of the apps instead of the details of the networking. Within 90 days you have a solid, compliant, and secure starting point which is the baseline for your cloud journey.

the use case

We got approached by Google that an enterprise customer wanted to add GCP to their portfolio of public clouds they use. They wanted to rely as much as possible on low-maintenance solutions like Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and others. The challenge they faced was their pretty complex organization which contains various departments in various regions in the world which needed to be mapped to the GCP environment in a way that scales but does not slow down the teams. They needed a pretty complex network design as well as direct connections to their on-premises data centers. All the services needed to follow security best practices and be compliant with their governance. On that scale, it is important to have an eye on clear ownership principles that can be implemented directly into the cloud console. Spending budgets on specific playground projects reduce the surprise and the end of the billing period.

It worked out well and we left another happy customer with a super smart and motivated team that is eager to dive deeper into the GCP ecosystem. But that’s just our view, if you like more details, please have a look at a session we had with Google to tell the story from the customer’s perspective.

Google provided amazing support throughout the whole process. Thanks, Google!

learnings

Plan & update stakeholders As the goal is to run this kind of project in an agile way we have to make sure the planning is done right. Of course, plans change during the process of the project but it is important to know which goals we are trying to reach. So over the whole process, it is critical to plan and replan the work and align it with the goals. There might be various stakeholders involved and all of them should be aligned.
Share the progress Sprint reviews with the engineering teams offer a great opportunity to share the progress across the organization. As the landing zone offers opportunities for a lot of teams it is critical to communicate across teams about progress and challenges since the teams can provide a lot of useful information that may be integrated into the architecture of the landing zone.
Enable the teams Introducing a bunch of new technologies can feel overwhelming for the customer’s teams. We noticed that learning and enablement for some customers is the most important part. So it is very important to make sure they understand and can maintain whatever we create for them. So having an eye on good documentation and regular Q/A sessions helps. Giving them some time to study some theory on GCP is a nice idea too, in case that’s possible. Context switching should be avoided as usual but for sure there are other things to maintain for SREs. If they have the feeling it is hard to focus on the new things, the management should make sure there are dedicated time boxes for the topics.
Control the scope A landing zone should provide the baseline for future growth. It is pretty hard to set the scope right as (of course) the super motivated customer teams like everything now. That’s great but to get the landing zone we try to focus on the basic parts first. So if there is an application that can be used as part of the MVP, I recommend going with something that uses most of the created environment but does not add more complexity for now.
Add an addendum to SoW with the actual plan in some cases the SoW is written (together with the customer) in a situation where the actual work is not completely defined. That might be caused by missing insights or unclear targets. Ideally, that should be avoided but in reality, that’s not always possible. So I would recommend adding an extra page to the SoW (which is the contract basically) after the first workshops are done and defining the scope and as many details as possible in there. That might still not be final but it is closer to reality than before those workshops.

The next step after a nicely made landing zone is the actual migration of the workloads but with a solid foundation, these goals are way easier to achieve. We recommend getting some help from a Google Partner for that too (like us ???? ) as that’s what we do all day and we can probably provide some tips and tricks.

We are looking forward to the next landing zone project. If you have a similar challenge feel to reach out to us.