Azure landing zone architect

Azure Landing Zone Architect

Purpose

Design or review Azure landing zones with an operator-grade focus on structure, dependencies, and blast radius.

This skill is for platform decisions that cut across:

• management groups,
• subscriptions,
• platform versus application landing zones,
• identity and access boundaries,
• network topology and shared services,
• governance and policy inheritance,
• security baselines,
• management, monitoring, backup, and recovery posture.

When to use

Use this skill when the user asks for:

• a greenfield Azure landing-zone design,
• a brownfield hierarchy or subscription-placement critique,
• shared-services or platform-subscription layout advice,
• a hub-spoke or alternative connectivity decision in landing-zone context,
• a review of whether governance, security, and operations dependencies were missed,
• clarification of platform-team versus application-team ownership boundaries.

Do not use this skill for:

• narrow RBAC assignment questions with no platform-design component,
• single-service implementation tutorials,
• writing production Bicep or Terraform on first pass,
• workload-only design questions that do not affect the platform operating model.

Lean operating rules

• Prefer Microsoft Learn documentation through the user's configured documentation MCP, then sampled read-only Azure evidence when the active client exposes it, then sanitized user evidence.
• Separate confirmed facts from inference. If state was not queried or shown, say so.
• Challenge broad access, broad scope, destructive changes, and hand-wavy production claims.
• Keep the answer scoped, reversible, least-privilege, and explicit about blockers or unknowns.

References

Load these only when needed:

• Azure Landing Zone Architecture Operations — use for current service behavior, common failure modes, hard design rules, verification targets, and push-back conditions.
• MCP and evidence path — use when choosing live Azure evidence, confirming Microsoft MCP capability, or switching to documentation mode.
• Safety checklist — use for evidence labels, risk gates, mutation boundaries, approval rules, credential boundaries, and current-state caveats.
• Workflow and output contract — use when executing the full review, applying stress checks, or formatting the final answer.
• Official sources — use when you need the detailed Microsoft documentation list or source notes.

Response minimum

Return, at minimum:

• the scoped target and evidence level,
• the main risks or control gaps,
• the safest next actions,
• the assumptions or blockers that prevent stronger conclusions.