Google Cloud Landing Zone — Architecture Design
What is a Google Cloud Landing Zone?
Google Cloud landing zone is like a blueprint for building a house in the cloud. Just like how you need a plan and foundation before building a house, you need a plan and foundation before building your applications and services on GCP.
Landing zone is essentially a set of best practices, tools, and architecture that helps you set up a secure, scalable, and well-organized environment in GCP. It helps you to quickly spin up your GCP resources with minimal effort, and also makes it easy for you to manage and govern your resources. Think of it like an instruction manual for creating a cloud environment that fits your specific needs.
For example, if you want to build a cloud-based website, a landing zone would help you set up the necessary servers, databases, and networking infrastructure in a way that is easy to manage and maintain, and also ensures that your website is highly available and scalable.
It is like building a castle in the clouds, where you get to decide the layout, the design and the infrastructure, and GCP landing zone gives you the blueprint to build it in a secure, structured and efficient way.
The following diagram shows a sample implementation of a landing zone. It shows an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) use case with hybrid cloud and on-premises connectivity in Google Cloud:
Above example architecture diagram shows a Google Cloud landing zone that includes the following Google Cloud services and features:
Google Cloud Resource Manager: Which is used to define a resource hierarchy with organizational policies.
Cloud Identity: It's used to synchronize with on-premises identity provider and Identity and Access Management (IAM), providing granular access to Google Cloud resources.
Network deployment includes:
- Shared Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network for each environment (production, development, and testing) that connects resources from multiple projects to the Host VPC network.
- VPC firewall rules that control connectivity to and from workloads in the Shared VPC networks.
- Cloud NAT gateway allows outbound connections to the internet from resources in these networks without external IP addresses.
- Cloud Interconnect connects on-premises applications and users. (Alternatively, you can choose Dedicated Interconnect or Partner Interconnect.)
- Cloud VPN connects to other cloud service providers.
- Cloud DNS private zone hosts DNS records for your deployments in Google Cloud.
- Multiple service projects are deployed in the Shared VPC networks. These service projects host your application resources.
Operations Suite like:
- Google Cloud Monitoring for application monitoring
- Cloud Logging for logs collection.
- Cloud Audit Logs, Firewall Rules Logging and VPC Flow Logs help ensure all necessary data is logged and available for analysis.
Security services:
- VPC Service Controls perimeter for each environment, that includes Shared VPC and the on-premises environment.
- A security perimeter isolates service and resources, which helps improve your ability to mitigate the risk of data exfiltration from supported Google Cloud services.
It’s important to note that the diagram is only an example and there is no single or standard implementation of a landing zone.
Your business must make many design choices, depending on different factors, including the following:
- Your industry
- Its organizational structure and processes
- Security and compliance requirements
- The workloads that you want to move to Google Cloud
- Your existing IT infrastructure and other cloud environments
- The location of your business and customers
It’s also recommended to have a well-defined strategy for your landing zone based on your organization’s specific needs and requirements.
Summary
In Conclusion, Google Cloud Landing Zone is a pre-configured set of infrastructure and platform resources that are ready to use in the Google Cloud Platform. It helps organizations to quickly set up a secure and compliant environment for their workloads in GCP, and it also helps organizations to manage and govern their resources in GCP.
About me — I am a GCP Cloud Architect with over a decade of experience in IT industry. A multi-cloud certified professional. Past 18 months I wrote 17+ cloud certification (10x GCP).
My current engagements are helping customer migrate their workloads from on-prem datacenter and other cloud providers to Google Cloud.
If you got any question, you can reach me on LinkedIn and twitter @jitu028 and DM, I’ll be happy to help!!
You can also schedule 1:1 discussion with me on https://www.topmate.io/jitu028 for any Google Cloud related support.
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