Azure Landing Zone: Architecture, Benefits & Overview

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Did you know that moving your company’s IT architecture to Azure was challenging? Despite the fact that Microsoft released best practice instructions for setting up Azure, companies were finding numerous ways on their own to figure out how to accomplish it. That is until Microsoft developed the Azure Landing Zone, a tool designed to make cloud migration much easier and faster.

The topics covered in this blog are:

What is an Azure Landing Zone?
Azure Landing Zones Implementation Options
Azure Landing Zone Architecture
Azure Landing Zone Accelerator
Benefits of Azure Landing Zones
How to Setup Azure Landing Zone
Conclusion
FAQs

What is an Azure Landing Zone?

A multi-subscription Azure system that caters to size, security governance, networking, and identity produces a Microsoft Azure landing zone. Azure’s landing zone enables enterprise-scale application migration, modernization, and innovation in Azure. This strategy considers all platform resources needed to serve the customer’s application portfolio, regardless of whether they are infrastructure or platform as a service.

Azure landing zones provide a defined design, reference implementations, and code samples for setting up the initial cloud environment. This environment will help all other adoption attempts by constantly adopting a set of common design areas. The cloud-based operating model is supported in these design areas.

Azure Landing Zones Implementation Options

Azure landing zones are built to satisfy clients’ individual needs based on current requirements, with a clear path to customize and mature any customized landing zone implementation. It starts with choosing a landing zone implementation option, which will swiftly deploy a cloud environment beginning point.

To encourage skill development and customization, some Azure landing zones are purposefully small. The “start small” implementation options set up an infrastructure-as-code approach and then present the IT staff with a number of decision aids. As the team’s cloud expertise grows, this iterative method establishes the framework parallel to the cloud adoption plan, allowing them to make better decisions.

The “enterprise-scale” deployment option fills in the gaps for enterprises with well-defined operating models. This option offers solutions for security, governance, and operations that are quite detailed. Organizations may reduce the number of decision points and apply a proven cloud operating model more quickly when starting with an enterprise scale.

1. Scalable and Modular

There is no one-size-fits-all answer for all technical contexts. A few Azure landing zone implementation alternatives, on the other part, can aid you in meeting the deployment and operations requirements of your expanding cloud portfolio.

Scalable

Despite the workloads or Azure resources deployed to each landing zone instance, all Azure landing zones facilitate cloud adoption at scale by offering repeatable environments with consistent setup and controls.

Modular

Based on a standard set of design areas, all Azure landing zones give an expandable way to build out your environment. A Microsoft Azure landing zone’s extensibility allows an organization to grow certain aspects of the environment as needs change simply.

2. Platform vs. Application Landing Zones

Landing zones are divided into two categories:

Platform Landing Zones

Subscriptions are used to provide centralized services that are used by a variety of workloads and applications. They are often administered by a single central team or a group of central teams divided by function (e.g., networking, identification). Platform landing zones are important services that can benefit from consolidation for efficiency and convenience. Networking, identification, and management services are just a few examples.

Application Landing Zones

One or more subscriptions deployed as an environment for an application or workload are referred to as application landing zones. To ensure policy restrictions are enforced effectively, application landing zones are set under management groups such as ‘corp’ or ‘online’ beneath the ‘landing zones’ management group.

The following are the subcategories of application landing zones:

1. Centrally Managed

The landing zone is completely administered by a central IT team. Controls and platform tools are applied to both the platform and application landing zones by the team.

2. Technology Platforms

The underlying service is frequently managed centrally with technology platforms such as AKS or AVS. The application teams that run on top of the service have been allocated duties. When compared to centrally administered landing zones, this results in different controls or access permissions.

3. Workload

A platform administration team delegated the entire landing zone to a workload team to fully manage and support the environment. The platform team stayed in control of the policies the Management Groups above enforced. Adding extra policies to the subscription scope and employing alternate technology for deploying, securing, and monitoring workloads that are fully managed and run by the workload team.

You can adapt the Microsoft Azure landing zone implementation options to your needs, whether you’re building your first production application on Azure or managing a complex portfolio of tech platforms and workloads.

Check Out: Our blog post on Microsoft Azure Certification Path 2023

Azure Landing Zone Architecture

The Azure landing zones architectural design shown below symbolizes the end point of many enterprises’ cloud adoption journeys. It’s a mature, scaled-out target architecture designed to help businesses run successful cloud environments while adhering to best practices for security and governance.

This conceptual architecture reflects scale and maturity decisions based on a wealth of lessons learned and input from Azure customers who adopted Azure.

Your specific implementation may vary due to specific business decisions or existing investments in tools that must prevail in your cloud environment. This conceptual architecture will assist in setting the tone for your business’s general approach to designing and implementing a landing zone.

Also Check: Top 60+ Azure Interview Questions

Azure Landing Zone Accelerator

There’s a readymade deployment experience called the Azure landing zone accelerator for enterprises. This conceptual architecture matches the operating model and resource structure they plan to use.

The accelerator is a portal-based Azure deployment that will provide a complete implementation of the conceptual architecture and opinionated configurations for important components like management groups and policies.

The Azure landing zone accelerator requires permissions to create resources at the tenant (/) scope before deployment. Tenant deployments with ARM templates: Permissions can be granted by following the instructions in Tenant deployments with ARM templates: Permissions. Access is required.

Benefits of Azure Landing Zones

These Landing Zones are meant to make migrating to the cloud easier and more secure while also preparing your business for the future. Here are a few of the primary advantages of using these blueprints:

1. Get Started with Azure in No Time

You effectively receive a readymade environment with a Microsoft Azure Landing Zone where you can start migrating workloads, users, and content. It saves time and allows your teams to start using the cloud sooner.

2. Future-proof and Adaptable

One of the most compelling aspects of Azure Landing Zones is their flexibility, which allows you to extend and adjust the environment as needed. They’re also built to be more efficient than traditional enterprise IT architecture, and they’ll show you how to run your architecture in the cloud using best practices.

3. A Less Steep Learning Curve

You minimize the chance of making costly mistakes that are difficult to correct later by providing a dependable and resilient foundation for your company’s cloud environment. They also mean you’ll spend less time figuring out Azure’s mechanics and more time fine-tuning the environment to meet your company’s needs.

Also Read: ADF Interview Questions

How to Setup Azure Landing Zone

Start by opening your Azure portal and looking for the term “Azure blueprints“
Choose a blueprint, then click “Get Started” to start building your first landing zone. A Migration Landing Zone is a typical place to start; it acts as the starting point for your blueprint.
Decide where it will store the Landing Zone (i.e., the server’s actual location). It will set it up for you and will configure an environment.
After that, you may change the blueprint, assign responsibilities, and establish policies for a variety of tasks, such as tagging or adding new resources to a group, generating artifacts, and so on.

After you’ve built up the Azure Landing Zone, the next step is to migrate workloads to it and invite employees to begin utilizing it.

Conclusion

The arrival of the Azure Landing Zone to the Microsoft Azure portal makes it easier for businesses to get up and operate in the cloud. Landing zones in Azure are the outcome of a multi-subscription Azure system that considers scale, security governance, networking, and identity. If you are still confused about anything, drop down your queries in the comment section!

FAQs

Q1. What is the difference between blueprints and landing zones in Azure?

Azure Blueprints and landing zones are related but serve different purposes. Azure Blueprints provide templates for deploying and governing cloud environments, while a landing zone is a preconfigured environment that serves as a foundation for hosting workloads. Blueprints can be used within a landing zone to enforce configurations and policies, ensuring consistency across deployments.

Q2. What is the purpose of landing zone in cloud?

The purpose of a landing zone in the cloud is to establish a secure and standardized foundation for deploying workloads and resources. It ensures that best practices, governance policies, and security controls are in place from the beginning, enabling organizations to deploy cloud resources more efficiently while maintaining security and compliance requirements.

Q3. What is a landing zone in Azure?

In Azure, a landing zone refers to a well-architected and standardized foundation for deploying cloud resources. It is a predefined and reusable framework that provides the initial structure, governance, and security controls for Azure environments, ensuring consistent and compliant deployments.

Q4. What are the benefits of Azure landing zone?

The benefits of Azure landing zones include streamlined deployment and management of cloud environments, improved security and compliance through standardized configurations, enhanced scalability and flexibility, enforced governance and policies, and reduced time and effort required for setting up consistent and well-architected cloud infrastructures.

Azure Landing Zone: Architecture, Benefits & How to Setup