My Journey into Azure Governance
From Chaos to Compliance with Azure Blueprints and Landing Zones
When we first stepped into cloud governance, we were managing dozens of Azure subscriptions across various departments. Everyone was deploying at full speed—but with that velocity came inconsistencies, security loopholes, and compliance headaches.
The Governance Problem
Teams chose their own regions, ignored tagging policies, and assigned roles ad hoc. Security and audit findings kept piling up. I knew we needed a standardized way to deploy and manage environments— a way to enforce compliance without slowing down innovation.
That’s when we discovered Azure Blueprints—and later, Azure Landing Zones.
Phase 1 – Establishing Order with Azure Blueprints
Our first focus was on establishing governance without becoming a bottleneck to the teams.
Azure Blueprints allowed us to:
- Bundle resource group structures, policy assignments, role assignments, and ARM templates into a versioned governance artifact.
- Assign it to any new or existing subscription.
- Ensure every subscription was created with a minimum baseline of compliance.
We created a blueprint called secure-landing-zone which enforced:
- Resource tagging
- HTTPS-only on storage accounts
- Disabled public IPs on VMs
- Enabled diagnostic logging
- Predefined networking and monitoring resource groups
- Environment-based role assignments
It worked beautifully — for a while.
Phase 2 – Growing Pains and the Limitations of Blueprints
Over time, we started hitting limits:
- Versioning and rollback were difficult
- CI/CD integration was weak
- We needed more modular and flexible governance
- Blueprints weren’t evolving much on Microsoft’s roadmap
We discovered Azure Landing Zones — a modern governance model from the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) that offered more than compliance:
- Network and identity architectures
- Security and compliance baselines
- Management group hierarchies
- Connectivity and hybrid readiness
Blueprints helped us enforce known rules. Landing Zones helped us design the future.
Phase 3 – Transitioning to Azure Landing Zones
Eventually, we adopted Microsoft’s Enterprise-Scale Landing Zone accelerator using:
- Bicep templates
- Azure Policy initiatives
- Management group hierarchy
We built a subscription provisioning pipeline that:
- Linked new subscriptions to the correct management group
- Deployed our full governance baseline
- Set budgets, policies, roles, and diagnostic settings
It was automated, consistent, and scalable. Blueprints became optional. Landing Zones became the standard.
Blueprints vs. Landing Zones: My Takeaways
| Feature | Azure Blueprints | Azure Landing Zones |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Governance bundling | Enterprise-scale architecture |
| Flexibility | Medium | High |
| CI/CD Integration | Limited | Excellent |
| Governance Scope | Subscription-level | Management-group-driven |
| Microsoft Roadmap | Slowing | Actively evolving |
Lessons I Learned
- Start with Blueprints when you need to enforce structure fast.
- Use Landing Zones when you need to scale with flexibility.
- Governance ≠ Restriction. It’s about enabling secure delivery.
- Automate everything — governance must live in pipelines.
- Blueprints are helpful. Landing Zones are foundational.
Final Thoughts
Looking back, Azure Blueprints gave me a much-needed head start on governance when everything felt out of control. But Landing Zones offered a more scalable, strategic foundation that grew with our cloud footprint.
If you're in the early stages of cloud adoption, Blueprints will help you get started. But if you’re serious about scale, security, and sustainability — Landing Zones are the way forward.
Ask yourself: “Do I need structure, or do I need strategy?”
If it’s structure, start with Blueprints.
If it’s strategy, embrace Landing Zones.
Helpful Resources
If you're at the early stage of your Azure governance journey, start simple—but start right. These tools can turn chaos into compliance, and stress into strategy.