AWS Landing Zone is currently in Long-term Support and will not receive any additional features. Customers interested in setting up a new landing zone should check out AWS Control Tower and Customizations for AWS Control Tower
AWS Landing Zone helps customers more quickly set up a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices. With the large number of design choices, setting up a multi-account environment can take a significant amount of time, involve the configuration of multiple accounts and services, and require a deep understanding of AWS services.
AWS Landing Zone can help save time by automating the set-up of an environment for running secure and scalable workloads while implementing an initial security baseline through the creation of core accounts and resources. It also provides a baseline environment to get started with a multi-account architecture, identity and access management, governance, data security, network design, and logging.
AWS Landing Zone uses the most up-to-date Node.js runtime. Version 2.3 uses the Node.js 8.10 runtime, which reached end-of-life on December 31, 2019. To upgrade to the latest version, you can update the stack.
AWS Landing Zone deploys an AWS Account Vending Machine (AVM) product for provisioning and automatically configuring new accounts. The AVM leverages AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) for managing user account access. This environment is customizable to allow customers to implement their own account baselines through a Landing Zone configuration and update pipeline.
Multi-Account Structure
Account Vending Machine
User Access
Notifications
Multi-Account Structure
The AWS Landing Zone solution includes four accounts, and add-on products that can be deployed using the AWS Service Catalog such as the Centralized Logging solution and AWS Managed AD and Directory Connector for AWS SSO.
The AWS Landing Zone is deployed into an AWS Organizations account. This account is used to manage configuration and access to AWS Landing Zone managed accounts. The AWS Organizations account provides the ability to create and financially manage member accounts. It contains the AWS Landing Zone configuration Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket and pipeline, account configuration StackSets, AWS Organizations Service Control Policies (SCPs), and AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) configuration.
Shared Services account
The Shared Services account is a reference for creating infrastructure shared services such as directory services. By default, this account hosts AWS Managed Active Directory for AWS SSO integration in a shared Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that can be automatically peered with new AWS accounts created with the Account Vending Machine (AVM).
Log Archive account
The Log Archive account contains a central Amazon S3 bucket for storing copies of all AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config log files in a log archive account.
Security account
The Security account creates auditor (read-only) and administrator (full-access) cross-account roles from a Security account to all AWS Landing Zone managed accounts. The intent of these roles is to be used by a company's security and compliance team to audit or perform emergency security operations in case of an incident.
This account is also designated as the master Amazon GuardDuty account. Users from the master account can configure GuardDuty as well as view and manage GuardDuty findings for their own account and all of their member accounts.
Account Vending Machine
The Account Vending Machine (AVM) is an AWS Landing Zone key component. The AVM is provided as an AWS Service Catalog product, which allows customers to create new AWS accounts in Organizational Units (OUs) preconfigured with an account security baseline, and a predefined network.
AWS Landing Zone leverages AWS Service Catalog to grant administrators permissions to create and manage AWS Landing Zone products and end user’s permissions to launch and manage AVM products.
The AVM uses launch constraints to allow end users to create new accounts without requiring account administrator permissions.
User Access
Providing least-privilege, individual user access to your AWS accounts is an essential, foundational component to AWS account management. The AWS Landing Zone solution provides customers two options to store their users and groups.
The default configuration deploys AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) with AWS SSO directory where users and groups can be managed in SSO.
A single-sign-on endpoint is created to federate user access to AWS accounts.
Notifications
The AWS Landing Zone solution configures Amazon CloudWatch alarms and events to send a notification on root account login, console sign-in failures, API authentication failures, and the following changes within an account: security groups, network ACLs, Amazon VPC gateways, peering connections, ClassicLink, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance state, large Amazon EC2 instance state, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, and AWS Config rule compliance status.
The solution configures each account to send notifications to a local Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic.
The All Configuration Events topic aggregates AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config notications from all managed accounts.
The Aggregate Security Notifications topic aggregates security notifications from specific Amazon CloudWatch events, AWS Config Rules compliance status change events, and AWS GuardDuty findings.
An AWS Lambda function is automatically subscribed to the security notifications topic to forward all notifications to an aggregation Amazon SNS topic in the AWS Organizations account.
This architecture is designed to allow local administrators to subscribe to and receive specific account notifications.
Security baseline
AWS Landing Zone includes an initial security baseline that can be used as a starting point for establishing and implementing a customized account security baseline for your organization. By default, the initial security baseline includes the following settings:
AWS CloudTrail
One CloudTrail trail is created in each account and configured to send logs to a centrally managed Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket in the log archive account, and to AWS CloudWatch Logs in the local account for local operations (with a 14-day log group retention policy).
Cross-Account Access
Cross-account access is used to configure audit and emergency security administrative access to AWS Landing Zone accounts from the security account.
AWS Config
AWS Config is enabled and account configuration log files are stored in a centrally managed Amazon S3 bucket in the log archive account.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
An Amazon VPC configures the initial network for an account. This includes deleting the default VPC in all regions, deploying the AVM requested network type, and network peering with the Shared Services VPC when applicable.
AWS Config Rules
AWS Config rules are enabled for monitoring storage encryption (Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon S3, and Amazon Relational Database Service), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) password policy, root account multi-factor authentication (MFA), Amazon S3 public read and write, and insecure security group rules.
AWS Landing Zone Notifications
Amazon CloudWatch alarms and events are configured to send a notification on root account login, console sign-in failures, and API authentication failures within an account.
AWS Identity and Access Management
AWS Identity and Access Management is used to configure an IAM password policy.
Amazon GuardDuty
Amazon GuardDuty is configured to view and manage GuardDuty findings in the member account.
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