Azure Landing Zones — Scenario Walkthrough

When I first started working with Microsoft Azure’s landing zones, I was interested in what they could offer. Some of the questions I was looking to answer included -

• What do we actually get when we deploy a landing zone?
• What does a typical landing zone look like?
• How does this impact any existing Azure subscriptions and resources?

I’ll attempt to cover these as part of this article by diving into a hands-on scenario.

There are plenty of great posts elsewhere that explain landing zones in more depth (links at the bottom of this page). So I’ll keep this overview relatively brief to provide just enough of a primer.

One of the challenges with adopting Azure is knowing where to start. This is where landing zones come in.

Landing zones are tightly coupled to Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework, which helps organisations make the proper governance, strategy and security decisions when migrating to Azure.

Essentially, the landing zone itself is a (mostly) empty Azure subscription into which we subsequently deploy our application workloads. But, as we’ll see, it's not just about an application subscription. A landing zone deployment can also include those foundational Azure services such as management groups and subscriptions, hybrid network connectivity, logging, and security policies.