Building an AWS Landing Zone from Scratch in Six Weeks

In an effort to deliver a simpler, smarter, and more unified experience on its website, the UK’s Ministry of Justice and its Lead Technical Architect, James Abley, created a bespoke AWS Landing Zone, a pre-defined template for an AWS account or infrastructure. And they did it in six weeks.

Supporting 33 agencies and public bodies, and making sure they all work together, the Ministry of Justice is at the heart of the United Kingdom’s justice system. Its task is to look after all parts of the justice system, including the courts, prisons, probation services, and legal aid, striving to bring the principles of justice to life for everyone in society.

In a This Is My Architecture video, shot at 2018 re:Invent in Las Vegas, James talks with AWS Solutions Architect, Simon Treacy, about the importance of delivering a consistent experience to his website’s customers, a mix of citizen and internal legal aid agency case workers.

Utilizing a number of AWS services, James walks us through the user experience, and he why decided to put AWS CloudFront and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) up front to improve the security posture of the ministry’s legacy applications and extend their lifespan. James also explained how he split traffic between two availability zones, using AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to provide higher availability and resilience, which will help with zero downtime deployment later on.

*Check out more This Is My Architecture videos on YouTube.