The use of a landing zone is one of the best practices and the starting point for any cloud infrastructure. It is advisable to choose an infrastructure-as-code approach for setting up the cloud environment and thus enabling the provision of resources. Our workshop shows what a landing zone requires, explains its advantages and shows how to set up a landing zone for the Google Cloud using Terraform.
A Landing Zone (LZ) aims to optimise and standardise the setup of the cloud environment. By following best practices, a landing zone helps to ensure reuse and standardisation and enforce compliance with agreed guidelines. It is operated using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).
Reasons in favour of a landing zone
The advantages of providing a landing zone are many and varied and are of crucial importance for companies that want to manage their cloud environments effectively and securely. The first advantage of setting up a landing zone is standardisation. A LZ offers a standardised approach to setting up and configuring cloud environments. This ensures that all deployments follow the same procedures, configurations and security standards to achieve a consistent infrastructure across the organisation and reduce unnecessary complexity. Through standardised policies, an LC helps to ensure that all cloud resources comply with common security requirements and regulatory standards. With such a preventative approach to security, the risk of vulnerabilities and security breaches is significantly reduced.
But efficiency and scalability also play a role, as a landing zone allows you to automate the provision of cloud resources and thus scale more easily. This type of automation not only speeds up the provisioning process, but also reduces the likelihood of human error, thereby increasing reliability and efficiency. As a result, LCs help to avoid unnecessary costs by ensuring that resources are allocated and utilised efficiently. Governance and standardised tagging methods make it easier to track and manage cloud spend across different departments or projects.
You can access the full article online in the IT-Administrator portal or read it in the November 2024 issue of IT-Administrator magazine.
