55. Azure Landing Zones, Cloud adoption framework and Infrastructure as Code - with Erwin Staal

Betatalks the podcast

In this episode, we talk with Erwin Staal. As an Azure Architect and DevOps consultant he loves helping companies deliver their software to customers using DevOps practices and cloud-native architectures. He believes in the power of both the monolith and microservices and prefers to run his workload on the Azure cloud and/or Kubernetes. We talk about Azure Landing Zones; what they are, why you want them, and the cloud adaption framework. An Azure Landing Zone is the output of a multi-subscription Azure environment that accounts for scale, security governance, networking, and identity. It enables application migration, modernization, and innovation at enterprise scale in Azure. Erwin has been involved in building and reviewing various Azure Landing Zones over the last couple of years. And he sees them as one of the pillars underneath a proper cloud adoption. Microsoft makes a distinction between two types of Landing Zones, which we will dive into. It’s a whole architecture, a structure of subscriptions, that allows you to host your workloads in a scalable, manageable way. We discuss the pros and cons of Azure Landing zones and how to get the proper permissions. We also dive into Infrastructure as code, which he wrote a book about. The book focuses on how to deliver your resources on Azure using infrastructure as code and then specifically Bicep. Erwin is in the process of writing an article and creating a new session on ‘Infrastructure as Code on Azure: Bicep vs. Pulumi vs. Terraform’. He found that a lot of people were asking which tool he prefers and when to use which, so he thought ‘why not’ write that down? Next to all this, we talk about which book changed his life and his participation in the Marathon of Rotterdam.

About this episode, and Erwin Staal in particular: you can find Erwin on Twitter at @erwin_staal & GitHub. And, visit his website and read all his interesting blogs. You can also find his book here.
About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel