Week of July-18

OK ... now that we have understood the steps on our cloud journey, with CAF for Azure, and how we can automate resource provisioning and operations, it is time to put it all together and take a closer look at a core concept when applying CAF in practise, which is the Landing Zone.

As per CAF definition, a Landing Zone is :

A landing zone is an environment for hosting your workloads, pre-provisioned through code.

A good first overview of Landing Zones is Azure Landing Zone Overview (by John Savill), which provides a 360° look at the Landing Zone concept.

We have also learned the difference between a Platform Landing Zone and an Application Landing Zone.

Granted, at first glance, the landing zone architecture can seem overwhelming, but in reality this is the first aspect of "make it your own". CAF, as well as the enterprise-scale evolution, are in-fact addressing a wide range of scenario's requirements, which may -or may not- match your exact requirements.

At its core, however, there are are common services (like connectivity, networking, policies) that are managed centrally and workload/project specific aspects that are partly provisioned when laying down a corresponding landing zone (e.g. network connectivity to the central network, etc.) and will be guard-railed by the policies defined at the global level. In order to streamline the management of those policies and access control, the Azure concept of Management Groups as the basis of the governance strategy.

Depending on the complexity of your environment, this hierarchy can be be of varying complexity.

Now we can get started to make it real and look further into Management Groups and how to get going with them.

In order to hit the ground running, Azure provides a set of Landing Zone Accelerators as a starting point. These accelerators provide us with themed examples that can be chosen, based on best matching a workload's requirements.

In order to start somewhere, let's take a closer look at the Bicep-based Modular Landing Zone Accelerator.

So, let's go, go, go ... and see if we can build a landing zone in a week.