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

A landing zone is an environment for hosting your Azure resources. An Azure landing zone is the recommended starting point to build your Azure environment. It provides a predefined setup for platform resources and application resources. If an Azure landing zone does not meet your requirements, follow the recommendations to create a custom environment.

There are two types of landing zones:

• Platform landing zone: A subscription that provides shared services (identity, connectivity, management) to applications in application landing zones.

• Application landing zone: A subscription for hosting an application or workload.

There are two steps to designing and deploying a landing zone:

• Reference architecture: A specific design that illustrates resource deployment to one or more Azure subscriptions.

• Reference implementation: A deployment in Azure that translates your reference architecture into reality. Several prebuilt deployment options for platform and application landing zones exist to simplify implementation. These deployment options use infrastructure as code (IaC) technologies, such as ARM templates, Bicep, or Terraform. You can adjust this IaC to meet your specific reference architecture needs.

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