This is the Before You Deploy overview. Seven field notes, one failure mode each, with NZ programme stories. The companion reference is Why Azure Landing Zones Fail Before They Begin.
Most landing zones do not fail because the technology is hard. They fail in the first weeks: scoping, governance, team design, delivery cadence. The platform can look perfect on day one and still be doomed by day thirty.
The companion article is the diagnostic. It names the modes in a list you can take into a steering committee. This series is the field notes underneath. One failure mode per part, each told through a New Zealand programme story, mostly at SELL!, a fictional Wellington fintech that did the rushed, recognisable version of each mistake.
The focus is people and process. Business context, who owns governance, whether anyone co-designed the path with a real workload team, whether finance could produce a cost breakdown, whether the network was inherited from a datacentre diagram, whether the code still matches reality after the first resignation, whether the programme was a big bang that never shipped an increment. Not reference architecture trivia.
What you will get across seven field notes
- Landing Zones Without Business Context: the accelerator ran. Nobody had mapped the workload that would live on it.
- Governance as a Blocker: deny first, three approvals, and a two person team that could not get a compliant environment in a week.
- The Platform Team That Built Alone: a landing zone built without a pilot partnership is a hypothesis that never met a customer.
- Undefined Subscription Strategy: finance cannot produce a cost breakdown. An auditor cannot list which subscriptions process personal information.
- Datacentre Thinking in a Cloud Landing Zone: network diagrams inherit easily. Decisions do not.
- IaC Without Platform Engineering Discipline: the bus number is one, and that one has a Sydney offer.
- Big Bang Over Incremental Delivery: how landing zones die. Not in a failed deployment. In a cancelled programme.
Read them in order if you are in the first months of a programme. Skip to the mode you recognise if you are already in the scar.
Who this is for
Cloud architects, DevOps engineers, and delivery leads running or reviewing a landing zone programme. The same readers as the companion article, with more room for the messy middle: the meeting, the escalation, the workaround nobody wrote down.
If you want what right looks like after the failure modes, that is the next arc: Success Patterns.
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