Landing Zones and Application Landing Zones

Imagine you run a farm.  All the central admin of the farm is done from the farmhouse, that’s where you decide what’s going to be grown in each of the fields.  This is where you govern things.  This is where you decide how you’re going to keep things secure. Think of this as your platform landing zone.  You’ll sometimes hear about a “hub and spoke” model, well this is the hub.

Now, on the farm you have fields where you grow crops.  Generally, in a field, you’ll have a single type of crop.  This means before planting, you’ll prepare the field for the crop that’s going in there – the way you plough and fertilize it will be targeted at this.  You’ll have secure fences around the field so that you can protect what’s inside.  Think of fields as your application landing zones.  In a hub and spoke model these are the spokes. 

In the field you then have your crops.  Think of your applications as crops.  You have your crops (applications) in fields (application landing zones) while still managing them from the farmhouse (platform landing zone).  Ultimately it’s the crops (applications) that have the value, but all this other infrastructure is built around them to keep them safe and make them manageable.

Finally, you need to move around.  You have tracks and gates to get from the farmhouse to the fields.  This is the connectivity.  Think of this as your network connections, or your network peering as we might say.  To get from one field to another, you have to go on a track and through a gate.  When you set up the farm, you decided where the tracks were and where the gates are.  Similarly, in a cloud application you’ll decide which application landing zones can connect  to others, and whether these connections are inbound-only, outbound-only or inbound-outbound.