Landing Zones on Google Cloud: What It Is, Why You Need One, and How to Create One

What is a Landing Zone?

According to Google’s best practice and reference designs, a landing zone provides an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) driven approach to creating an organisation in GCP, and for subsequently deploying tenants and their resources to this GCP organisation. It enforces best practices and automation, whilst delegating appropriate levels of resource control to tenants.

Side note: What is a tenant? A tenant is an independent consumer of the platform. The tenant could be an individual, but is more likely to be a team that is responsible for an application, or a related set of applications.

Why Do We Want One?

Landing zones are a way for an organisation / enterprise to build their Google Cloud environment in a structured and consistent way, following a load of proven best practice. It ensures that all the tenants that run on the landing zone avoid re-inventing the wheel, are using appropriate shared components, are adhering to agreed policies, and are only building their environments using approved IaC routes.

Benefits include:

• Avoidance of unmanaged (Google) project sprawl. I.e. because projects are deployed within standard tenantfolder, with standard naming conventions, and with a standardised approach to labelling resources.
• Avoidance of unnecessary complexity. I.e. because all…