Prepare for cloud adoption

Before adoption can begin, you create a landing zone to host the workloads that you plan to build in or migrate to the cloud. This section of the framework guides you through environment preparation and landing zone creation.

Landing zone concepts

If you understand Azure landing zones, you can skip ahead to the next section. If not, here are some concepts to review before proceeding:

• Abstractly speaking, a landing zone helps you plan for and design an Azure deployment, by conceptualizing a designated area for placement and integration of resources. There are two types of landing zones:

  • platform landing zone: provides centralized enterprise-scale foundational services for workloads and applications.
  • application landing zone: provides services specific to an application or workload.

• Concretely, a landing zone can be viewed through two lenses:

  • reference architecture: a specific design that illustrates resource deployment to one or more Azure subscriptions, which meet the requirements of the landing zone.
  • reference implementation: artifacts that deploy Azure resources into the landing zone subscription(s), according to the reference architecture. Many landing zones offer multiple deployment options, but the most common is a ready-made Infrastructure as Code (IaC) template referred to as a landing zone accelerator. Accelerators automate and accelerate the deployment of a reference implementation, using IaC technology such as ARM, Bicep, Terraform, and others.

• A workload deployed to an application landing zone integrates with and is dependent upon services provided by the platform landing zone. These infrastructure services run workloads such as networking, identity access management, policies, and monitoring. This operational foundation enables migration, modernization, and innovation at enterprise-scale in Azure.

In summary, Azure landing zones provide a destination for cloud workloads, a prescriptive model for managing workload portfolios at scale, and consistency and governance across workload teams.

Landing zone journey

As you work your way through the Ready guide, consider your progress as a continuous journey that prepares you for landing zone creation. The journey consists of four major phases and related processes:

• Bootstrap your environment

  • Create subscriptions manually
  • Create subscriptions programatically
  • Subscription vending modules

• Deploy Azure platform landing zone components

  • Accelerator portal
  • Bicep modules
  • Bicep Accelerator
  • Terraform module

• Subscription landing zone vending process

  • Vending module (Terraform)
  • Vending module (Bicep)

• Deploy workload landing zone components

  • Cloud adoption scenarios and related accelerators

The phases and processes are covered in more detail as you progress through the Ready guide.

Next steps

Continue with cloud adoption and preparing your Azure environment for landing zones, by reviewing the Azure setup guide.