Building the foundation of a resilient, zero-trust, hybrid multi-cloud platform.
Goals
- Hybrid & Multi‑Cloud: Active/Active across two AWS regions (primary), with Azure & GCP landing zones. Seamless hybrid via Direct Connect/ExpressRoute/Interconnect, Cloud WAN/Aviatrix.
- Separation of Concerns: Networking, Platform, Data, Security, Observability, Developer Experience (DevEx), and Workloads are modular planes with clear contracts.
- Everything as Code: Terraform/Terragrunt, Crossplane (K8s‑native cloud APIs), Ansible, Policies‑as‑Code (OPA/Kyverno/Sentinel/Conftest), Pipelines‑as‑Code (GitHub Actions), Dashboards‑as‑Code (Grafana JSON, Prometheus rules), FinOps‑as‑Code (Infracost + policy gates).
- Golden Paths: Backstage templates + ArgoCD GitOps, paved‑road modules, secure defaults, org‑wide tagging/labels.
- Zero‑Trust: Identity‑aware proxies, SPIFFE/SPIRE, BeyondCorp‑style access, ZTNA for users and workloads.
Non‑Functional Requirements (NFRs)
- RTO/RPO tiers: Tier‑0 (RTO≤5m, RPO≈0), Tier‑1 (RTO≤30m, RPO≤5m), Tier‑2 (RTO≤4h, RPO≤1h), Tier‑3 (best‑effort).
- Latency SLOs: P95 global user < 200 ms; intra‑region service P95 < 10 ms; cross‑region replication P95 < 250 ms.
- Change safety: Progressive delivery, automated rollbacks, chaos & load tests in CI before prod.
- Compliance: CIS, ISO‑27001, SOC2, PCI‑DSS, HIPAA—mapped to controls and automated evidence.
On‑Premises (two data centers + edge sites)
- Compute: VMware vSphere 8 clusters (vSAN stretched); Nutanix AHV islands for specific workloads.
- Network: Leaf‑spine with EVPN/VXLAN, dual ToR; NSX‑T overlay + distributed firewall; F5 BIG‑IP or NGINX Plus for L4–7.
- Kubernetes: OpenShift (primary) and RKE2 (secondary) clusters; MetalLB for bare‑metal L2/L3 services; Calico or Cilium for CNI & NetworkPolicy.
- Storage: NetApp ONTAP (NAS/SAN), Pure FlashArray; object storage via MinIO (S3‑compatible) for local lakehouse cache.
- Identity: Active Directory (AD DS) with Entra ID sync (SCIM), conditional access.
Cloud
- AWS (primary): Multi‑account via Organizations/Control Tower, OUs: Security, Shared‑Services, Platform, Data, Sandbox, Prod/Staging/Dev.
- Azure & GCP : Parity landing zones (VNet/VPC; AKS/GKE; IAM/Entra/Workload Identity; equivalent data & observability stacks).
Global Connectivity
- WAN: Dual Direct Connect to each AWS region (hosted + dedicated), separate providers; ExpressRoute/Interconnect to Azure/GCP. BGP with diverse POPs, 10–100 Gbps links.
- Cloud WAN / Aviatrix: Global segmentation (Prod/Non‑Prod/Shared/Secure), hub‑and‑spoke VRFs, distributed firewalling, traffic engineering.
- DNS: Route 53 + on‑prem Infoblox; Private Hosted Zones with Route 53 Resolver inbound/outbound endpoints; DNSSEC and dedicated forwarding rules.
- IPAM: NetBox source of truth, IP allocations as code.
- Per‑Region Hub/Spoke: TGW (AWS) + GWLB for inline IDS/IPS (Palo Alto/Check Point) and DLP; NVA scale sets in Azure; Cloud Router in GCP.
- Egress: Centralized egress VPC/VNet with NAT, TLS inspection (where legal), egress proxy (Squid/Envoy), outbound Service Mesh EgressGateway for app traffic allow‑list.
- Ingress: Multi‑ingress (Istio IngressGateway + NGINX Ingress + ALB Ingress Controller). Global Accelerator + Route 53 latency/health checks.
- Micro‑Segmentation: Cilium Network Policies & Hubble visibility; on‑prem NSX‑T DFW; optional Illumio for hybrid visibility.
- Secrets & PKI: Vault (Raft HA) with Transit/Transform engines (tokenization), PKI intermediate CAs; SPIFFE/SPIRE for workload IDs.
- ZTNA: Identity‑aware proxy (Pomerium/Cloudflare Access/Okta ASA), Teleport for bastionless SSH/Kube.
- Data Protection: BYOK/HYOK with KMS + CloudHSM; envelope encryption everywhere; customer‑managed keys per tenant.
- Clusters: EKS (Bottlerocket & managed node groups + Karpenter), AKS, GKE, OpenShift on‑prem. Cluster API to standardize lifecycle.
- Add‑Ons: Cilium (eBPF), Cluster Autoscaler, VPA, Karpenter consolidation, Kyverno/Gatekeeper, ExternalDNS, cert‑manager (ACME + private PKI), External Secrets Operator.
- Service Mesh: Istio multi‑cluster/multi‑mesh with east‑west gateways, mTLS (STRICT), traffic policies (canary/A‑B, fault injection), global virtualservices layered with local override.
- API Management: Kong Gateway w/ OPA plugins (or Apigee/AGW), rate‑limits, JWT/OIDC, API monetization (if needed).
- Platform APIs: Crossplane to provision cloud resources via CRDs (RDS/Aurora/S3/Queues) with compositions; Backstage as the developer portal & service catalog.
- Serverless: Lambda/Step Functions/EventBridge (+ Azure Functions/Logic Apps; Cloud Functions/Workflows) for event‑driven glue & control‑planes.
- Batch/HPC: AWS Batch + Slurm on EKS (Karpenter spot), FSx for Lustre for scratch IO, Spot‑aware queueing.
- OLTP: Aurora Global DB (MySQL/Postgres) active/reader topology; DynamoDB Global Tables for low‑latency KV; PostgreSQL on‑prem for locality with CDC to cloud.
- Search & Analytics: OpenSearch for search/time‑series; ClickHouse for ultra‑fast OLAP; optional Snowflake for cross‑cloud warehousing.
- Streaming: MSK (Kafka) multi‑AZ w/ tiered storage + Schema Registry; Debezium CDC; optional Pulsar for geo‑replication; EventBridge/SNS/SQS for app events.
- Lakehouse: S3/ADLS/GCS with Delta Lake / Apache Iceberg, Glue/Databricks/EMR for ETL; Trino/Athena for interactive queries.
- Caching: ElastiCache Redis (w/ Redis Enterprise CRDT for active‑active when needed) + Memcached for simple patterns.
- Data Governance: Lake Formation, Apache Ranger/Atlas, Unity Catalog (if Databricks); classification with Macie/DLP; lineage via OpenLineage/Marquez.
- ML Platform: Feature store (Feast), tracking/registry (MLflow), pipelines (Kubeflow/SageMaker Pipelines), KFServing/Seldon or SageMaker for serving; drift detection & shadow deployments.
- Metrics: Prometheus → Thanos (global view, object storage). Recording/alerting rules as code.
- Logs: Loki with S3 backend, tiered retention (hot/warm/cold), schema labels standardized via GEL/Vector.
- Traces: OpenTelemetry Collector → Tempo/Jaeger. Trace‑ID propagation enforced by gateways and SDKs.
- eBPF: Pixie for deep K8s telemetry, Cilium/Hubble flow; kernel‑level insights.
- Synthetics/RUM: k6 cloud or Grafana k6, blackbox exporter; real‑user monitoring for web/mobile.
- SIEM/SOAR: Splunk/Elastic/Sentinel; automated playbooks (Phantom/XSOAR/Logic Apps) for triage.
- Incident: Alertmanager → PagerDuty/Slack; Blameless postmortem templates; Error Budgets with Sloth/Nobl9.
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Org Guardrails: SCPs (deny wide‑open S3, restrict regions, enforce MFA), AWS Config rules, Azure Policies, GCP Org Policies.
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IAM & SSO: Entra ID/Okta → AWS IAM Identity Center (SAML/OIDC, SCIM).
- ABAC via tags; permission boundaries; session policies; just‑in‑time elevation (break‑glass w/ MFA + short TTL).
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PAM: CyberArk for secrets/privileged sessions; Teleport for short‑lived certs & session recording.
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Workload Identity: SPIFFE/SPIRE issuance; IRSA/Workload Identity (AWS/GCP); Managed identities (Azure).
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Supply Chain: SLSA‑3 builds, SBOM (Syft), vuln scan (Grype/Trivy), image signing (Cosign) + attestations/in‑toto, Rekor transparency log; admission policies to block unsigned/critical vulns.
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Vuln & Posture: Inspector, Wiz/Prisma, tfsec/checkov; CodeQL/Snyk in CI.
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Data Security: Vault Transform for tokenization; BYOK/HYOK; client‑side encryption SDKs for PII; DLP at egress; Macie for S3.
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Compliance Automation: Conformity packs (PCI/HIPAA), evidence collection (Config/CloudTrail/Activity Logs) → audit lake.
- Allocation: OpenCost for K8s, CUR (AWS) → Athena/QuickSight; Azure Cost Management; GCP BQ exports.
- Policy Gates: Infracost delta thresholds in PR; budget & anomaly detection per OU/account; savings plans/RI planners.
- Right‑Sizing: Karpenter consolidation + VPA recommendations; EBS/GP3 downsizing; storage lifecycle policies (S3 IA/Glacier).
- CarbonOps: Track region/instance footprint (e.g., AWS CCF tool) and prefer greener regions where latency permits.
- Patterns: Active/Active for stateless + cache; Active/Passive for heavy state; global read replicas (Aurora) with controlled promotion.
- Backups: AWS Backup vaults (immutable/locked) cross‑region; database PITR; FSx/NetApp snapshots; on‑prem Cohesity/Commvault integrated to S3.
- Runbooks: Route 53/GA failover; Kafka client re‑point; ArgoCD promote standby; Vault DR secondary promote.
- GameDays: LitmusChaos + Gremlin scenarios; quarterly DR drills with automated scoring.
- Backstage: Software templates for service/new data pipeline/new ML model; docs, runbooks, ownership; scorecards (SLOs, security posture).
- Paved‑Road: Opinionated Helm charts + OpenFeature for flags; built‑in OTel, health probes, SLOs, PDBs, HPA/VPA defaults; Istio policies.
- Self‑Service: Backstage → Crossplane/ArgoCd/Service Catalog to provision RDS/Aurora/Redis/Kafka topics w/ quotas & guardrails.
- Ephemeral Envs: Preview namespaces per PR; short‑lived DNS/certs; teardown on merge.
- New Account/Project: Account vending (Control Tower Customizations); attach SCP set; enable baseline (CloudTrail/Config/Security Hub/GuardDuty/Detective); create Network+Platform+Data stacks; register with Thanos/Loki/Tempo.
- New Region: Deploy hub VPC/VNet; peer/attach to TGW/Cloud WAN; mesh expansion (east‑west GW); register resolvers; enable DX/ER path.
- Disaster: GA/Route 53 flip; Aurora global promotion; MSK client bootstrap swap; ArgoCD app-of-apps flips to standby; Vault DR secondary promote; validate via smoke synthetic.
- Incident: PagerDuty; isolate namespace/segment (NetworkPolicy quarantine); forensic snapshot; Falco/GuardDuty triage; Loki search by traceID; postmortem creation in Backstage.
- Key Compromise: Revoke Cosign keyless subject, rotate KMS CMKs, rotate Vault mounts, force image re‑sign & re‑deploy.
- Control Library: Mapped controls (CIS 1.x, ISO Annex A, PCI Req 3/7/10, HIPAA 164.xx) → IaC modules with evidence hooks.
- Evidence: Conftest attestations; Terraform state diffs; OPA decision logs; CloudTrail/Activity Logs → Audit Lake (S3/BQ/ADLS) with immutable retention.
- Data Residency: Region guardrails + key residency; CloudFront geo‑restrictions; egress deny‑lists.
- Platform Core: Networking (Cloud WAN/TGW), Platform (K8s/Argo/Backstage), Data (OLTP/Lakehouse), Security (IAM/Vault/SIEM), SRE (Observability/SLOs), FinOps.
- Federated Product Teams: Own services via golden paths; budgets & SLOs; on‑call rotation with SRE support.
- Foundations: Multi‑account/org guardrails; hub networks; identity/SSO; audit baseline.
- Platform MVP: EKS + GitOps; Backstage; Observability core (Prom/Tempo/Loki/Grafana); FinOps plumbing.
- Data MVP: Aurora/Dynamo; MSK; Lake foundation; CDC.
- Hybrid Link: DX/ER, DNS resolvers, on‑prem clusters.
- Scale & Harden: Multi‑region active/active, chaos/DR drills, supply‑chain enforcement, self‑service.
AWS: Organizations, Control Tower, IAM Identity Center, IAM, KMS/CloudHSM, Route 53 (+ Resolver/Health Checks), CloudFront, Global Accelerator, WAF, Shield Adv, VPC/TGW/GWLB/NAT/Privatelink/Lattice, EKS, ECS/Fargate, Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge, SQS/SNS, API Gateway, S3, EBS, EFS, FSx (Lustre/NetApp/Windows), RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, MSK, Kinesis (opt), Glue/EMR/Athena, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, Redshift (opt), CloudTrail, Config, Security Hub, GuardDuty, Detective, Macie, Inspector, CloudWatch/X‑Ray/Logs, Backup, Budgets/Cost Explorer/Anomaly Detection.
Azure: Management Groups/Policies, Entra ID, VNet/Firewall/Private Link, AKS, Functions/Logic Apps, Event Hub/Service Bus, Cosmos DB/SQL MI, Storage/ADLS, Monitor/Log Analytics/Sentinel, Purview, Front Door/Traffic Manager, ExpressRoute.
GCP: Folders/Org Policies, VPC/Cloud Router, GKE, Cloud Functions/Workflows, Pub/Sub, Spanner/Cloud SQL/BigQuery, GCS, Cloud Armor, Cloud Interconnect.
On‑Prem/SaaS/Open‑Source: vSphere/vSAN/NSX‑T, NetApp/Pure, F5/NGINX, Infoblox, Backstage, ArgoCD, Crossplane, Istio/Cilium, Prometheus/Thanos/Loki/Tempo/Grafana, Pixie, Vault, Teleport, Kyverno/OPA, Trivy/Grype, Cosign/Syft, Debezium/Kafka, Trino, ClickHouse, Databricks (opt), Snowflake (opt), Cohesity/Commvault, NetBox.
- User‑Facing Edge: Multi‑CDN → GA → WAF → Mesh ingress → Services on EKS/AKS/GKE/OpenShift.
- State: OLTP in Aurora/Dynamo; analytics in ClickHouse/Snowflake/Trino; search in OpenSearch; caches in Redis.
- Control Planes: GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Crossplane, Backstage, Vault, Teleport, SIEM.
- Hybrid Bridges: DX/ER, DNS resolvers, Kafka MirrorMaker (if needed), storage gateways, identity federation.
- Global Consistency: Use CRDT or idempotent eventing; limit cross‑region writes; apply saga patterns.
- Blast Radius: Hard tenant isolation (namespaces+network+IAM+KMS); per‑tenant keys; rate‑limits; cell‑based architecture.
- Supply‑Chain: Mandatory signatures + SBOM attestation; break‑glass reviewed by Security; provenance stored immutably.
- Runaway Cost: Quotas + Infracost gates + anomaly alerts; Karpenter consolidation; schedule down non‑prod.
| Area | Tools / Services |
|---|---|
| IaC & Policy | Terraform, Terragrunt, Crossplane, OPA, Kyverno |
| Platform | EKS, OpenShift, Istio, ArgoCD, Backstage |
| Data | Aurora, DynamoDB, Kafka, ClickHouse, S3 |
| Observability | Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Grafana, Pixie |
| Security | Vault, SPIFFE/SPIRE, Kyverno, Cosign |
| CI/CD | GitHub Actions, Flagger, Karpenter |
| FinOps | Infracost, OpenCost, CUR exports |
⭐ “Build it once. Scale it everywhere.”
Designed for high availability, zero trust, and developer happiness.