Azure Landing Zone

Azure Landing Zone

As organizations accelerate their journey to the cloud, laying down a solid, scalable and secure foundation becomes critical. Microsoft Azure offers a well-architected approach for cloud adoption through Azure Landing Zones — blueprints that guide enterprises in setting up scalable, secure, and governed environments.

In this post, we’ll explore:

  • What Azure Landing Zones are
  • The distinction between Platform and Application Landing Zones
  • Best practices and tools for implementation

What is an Azure Landing Zone?

An Azure Landing Zone is a set of guidelines, configurations, and resources that establish the foundational infrastructure for deploying workloads in Azure. It ensures consistency across identity, networking, security, and governance from day one.

It is not just infrastructure code — it’s a combination of:

  • Design principles
  • Architecture decisions
  • Policy enforcement (e.g., via Azure Policy)
  • Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates

Landing zones are a core part of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF).

Azure Landing Zone Azure Landing Zone

Platform Landing Zone: Your Cloud Backbone

The Platform Landing Zone (PLZ) is your core infrastructure layer. It is typically owned by a central cloud enablement or platform team and provides the shared services, security, and governance capabilities that all applications rely on.

Key Components

  1. Identity and Access Management

    • Integration with Azure AD
    • Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
    • Conditional Access Policies

  2. Network Topology

    • Hub-and-Spoke or Virtual WAN
    • ExpressRoute, VPN Gateway, or Azure Firewall
    • DNS and private endpoints for secure access

  3. Management and Monitoring

    • Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights
    • Azure Policy and Blueprints
    • Resource tagging and inventory

  4. Security and Governance

    • Azure Defender and Microsoft Sentinel
    • Key Vault for secrets management
    • Secure Baselines with Azure Security Center

  5. Landing Zone Automation Tools

    • Terraform modules via Azure Landing Zones GitHub repo
    • Bicep templates via Azure Resource Manager
    • Microsoft’s Enterprise-Scale reference architecture

Application Landing Zone: Deploying Workloads Safely

The Application Landing Zone (ALZ) represents a scoped deployment environment where specific workloads or applications are hosted. These zones consume the shared services provided by the Platform Landing Zone.

Each ALZ aligns with:

  • A specific application team
  • A defined business unit or product group
  • One or more subscriptions under an Azure Management Group

Components of Application Landing Zones

  1. Subscription Boundaries

    • Aligned per environment (dev, test, prod)
    • Managed by the app team with delegated permissions

  2. Network Integration

    • Connected to the platform hub using VNet peering or Azure Virtual WAN

  3. Security and Compliance

    • Scoped Azure Policy Assignments
    • Integration with platform monitoring and logging

  4. Application Resource Deployment

    • IaC pipelines for deploying compute, storage, databases, etc.
    • CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions)

  5. Team Autonomy

    • Developers have permissions to deploy resources, within guardrails
    • Cost centers are tracked via tags and Cost Management tools

Governance & Management Hierarchy

Microsoft recommends using a management group hierarchy like this:

Root MG → Platform MG → Shared Services Subscriptions

Root MG → Application MG → App1 MG → App1 Dev, Test → Prod Subscriptions

Root MG → Application MG → App2 MG → App2 Dev, Test → Prod Subscriptions

This structure:

  • Segregates shared services from applications
  • Enables policy inheritance and granular access control
  • Simplifies billing and cost management
  • Azure Landing Zones Accelerator: Enterprise-scale reference implementation for Terraform and Bicep.
  • CAF Terraform Modules: Modular approach to deploy platform and application landing zones.
  • Azure Policy as Code: Define and deploy compliance policies via CI/CD.

Best Practices

  • Start small, scale safely: Begin with core platform services, then onboard apps.
  • Automate everything: Use GitOps/IaC pipelines to manage infrastructure.
  • Enforce security baselines: Leverage Defender for Cloud and Azure Policy.
  • Enable self-service: Empower teams to deploy within defined boundaries.
  • Tag consistently: Track ownership, cost, environment, and lifecycle.

Conclusion

Azure Landing Zones are more than technical scaffolding — they’re a strategic cloud foundation that balances speed, security, and control. Whether you’re building your first workload in Azure or scaling across regions and teams, starting with a robust Platform and Application Landing Zone model is key.

Ready to get started? Explore Microsoft’s Enterprise-scale Landing Zones.

In upcoming blogs, we will discuss more on Azure Cloud. To make this series more understandable, I am splitting this into multiple blogs

Part 1 - What is Cloud Computing and Services

Part 2 - What is Microsoft Azure

Part 3 - Azure Compute Storage and Networking

Part 4 - Azure Identity & Access Management

Part 5 - Azure Cloud Adoption Framework & Well Architected Framework

Part 6 - Azure Landing Zone

Thanks, 😊

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