A GCP landing zone should make cloud delivery safer and easier. It should not become a documentation graveyard or a one-time architecture diagram nobody uses.
The practical goal is repeatable governance: clear structure, controlled access, consistent logging, and a delivery path that engineers can follow.
Core Landing Zone Areas
Review:
- organization and folder structure
- project naming
- IAM roles and groups
- service account ownership
- networking model
- shared VPC decisions
- logging and monitoring
- budgets and billing alerts
- security baselines
- Terraform or deployment workflow
- CI/CD permissions
IAM And Service Accounts
IAM is usually where cloud risk grows fastest.
Check:
- broad roles
- owner/editor assignments
- unused service accounts
- unclear service account keys
- custom roles
- group-based access
- break-glass access
- CI/CD deployment identity
Avoid assigning access directly to individuals where a managed group would be cleaner.
Logging And Budgets
Every landing zone needs basic operational visibility.
Check:
- audit logs
- log sinks
- monitoring alerts
- billing exports
- budget alerts
- owner notifications
- incident routing
Cost governance is part of operations. If nobody sees the budget alerts, the control does not exist in practice.
Delivery Workflow
A landing zone should define how change happens.
Document:
- where Terraform lives
- who can approve changes
- how environments are separated
- how secrets are handled
- how rollback works
- how exceptions are requested
- how new projects are created
Product Fit
For a ready-to-use GCP governance workflow, use the GCP Landing Zone Automation Kit:
https://store.cloudpeakify.com/products/gcp-landing-zone-automation-kit
For broader cloud governance structure, pair it with:
https://store.cloudpeakify.com/products/cloud-foundation-governance-kit
Final Checklist
Before calling the landing zone ready, confirm:
- IAM is group-based where possible
- service account ownership is documented
- logging is enabled
- budgets are active
- network decisions are recorded
- deployment workflow is repeatable
- exceptions have an owner
- engineers know how to request or deploy changes