August 6th marked the second Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) Community of Practice meeting. If you missed the first meeting, you can catch up with our previous write-up. As expected, this session featured some very thought-provoking discussions. The meeting kicked off with a survey to determine who is currently using LZA and who is LZA curious. Of the 10 institutions in attendance, a little over a third were currently using LZA, while the rest were not, although they were eager to learn more about it.
An open question was posed to the group: Does anyone have both a development and a production environment for their landing zone? Washington University shared that they do, and that they benefit greatly from this design, as it allows for a DevOps-centric approach to AWS Organization management. This was followed by a brief yet enlightening Q&A session about their approach.
We then transitioned to LZA announcements from AWS. Just about two weeks prior to the writing of this blog, version 1.9.0 of LZA was released. The highlight of this release is that it “provides the opportunity for new installations to leverage Amazon S3 for storing the LZA configuration files, which were previously managed by AWS CodeCommit.”
AWS then offered several ideas for the next set of meetings based on the group’s feedback. Since a number of attendees are in the exploratory stage of LZA, next month’s meeting will include an introductory walkthrough of LZA from a high-level, technical, and philosophical perspective. So if you’re looking for a 101 overview of LZA, this is the meeting you won’t want to miss.
In October, AWS will bring members from the LZA development team to walk through roadmap items for LZA. There will be details in this call that you won’t be able to get anywhere else! For that reason, if you want to join this call, make sure that your institution has an NDA with AWS. You can verify this with your AWS account team. After confirming, email bflynn@internet2.edu to let Bob know that you’re eligible to hear the secrets the LZA team has to share.
This month's meeting reaffirmed that this is not just a group of technical users, but also long-term visionaries and deep thinkers, dedicated to exploring the power of LZA within organizations. As we head toward the next session, we aim to keep the momentum going and look forward to welcoming new perspectives. We hope you enjoyed this write-up. As always, feel free to send any feedback to tmanik@internet2.edu.