Cloud architecture and landing zones

Most cloud estates are not designed. They accumulate. One account becomes five, someone adds a VPC by hand, permissions get widened to unblock a release, and two years later nobody can answer which team owns what or why the bill went up.

A landing zone is the structure that prevents that.

Accounts and boundaries

We design the account topology around blast radius and ownership: production separated from everything else, workloads isolated from shared services, and each team with a clear boundary they control. Network segmentation follows the same logic - private subnets by default, explicit paths between tiers, and private connectivity to managed services rather than routing internal traffic across the public internet.

Identity that scales past ten people

Access is designed around roles and short-lived credentials federated from your identity provider, not long-lived keys pasted into a CI system. This is the difference between onboarding an engineer in minutes and discovering nine months later that a contractor still has production access.

Guardrails, not gatekeeping

Guardrails expressed as policy-as-code make the insecure or expensive option the difficult one - approved regions, mandatory encryption, required tags - while leaving teams free to move inside those boundaries without raising a ticket.

Tagging is part of the foundation rather than an afterthought, because cost attribution is impossible to retrofit across an estate that has been running untagged for a year.

Availability proportionate to need

Not every workload needs multi-region. We design to the availability target the business actually has, document the recovery objectives, and - importantly - test the failover rather than assuming it works.