What is an Azure Landing Zone?

You've heard the term, but what does it mean?

Azure Landing Zone

If you've been working in the Microsoft Azure eco-system at all you'll probably have stumbled across the phrase "Azure Landing Zone", or even "Minimum Viable Product". But what do either of them mean?

The Azure Landing Zone is basically, in it's simplest form a bunch of services within Azure that give you a place to somewhere to deploy other Azure services. 😉

So within your landing zone you'd need things like an Azure subscription to start with, whether you have one or multiple you need one to start you Azure journey. Then you'll need things like resource groups to logically store your services together. And for some services you'll need things like Azure virtual networks to exist.

This is no different than if you were building an on prem datacentre for your company, you'd need an area inside a building for the servers (i.e. an Azure subscription) and you'd need to install switches and routers (i.e. Azure virtual network) amongst other things before you started to install your servers, you need that landing zone or minimum viable product in place.

Azure is no different. 😀

Implementation methods

Once you've designed your landing zone, it is time to implement it. Now of course you could deploy it via the Azure Portal, however looking at automating it, in a repeatable way is best practice. Using tools such as ARM Templates, or Azure Blueprints or Terraform. The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework has some great resources that can help get you started.

If you check out the landing zone implementation options there are templates you can deploy or use as a baseline to get you started on your implementation.

Conclusion

Hopefully this short blog post has helped to clear up what an Azure Landing zone is. 😉

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