Azure Landing Zones (ALZ) has become the de facto standard for designing and implementing scalable, secure, and well-governed cloud environments. As an integral part of the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, the ALZ methodology has significantly evolved over the years. Today, it is supported by a vibrant community that engages through GitHub discussions and community calls.

The coding assets for ALZ have also matured and expanded to address diverse scenarios and tooling requirements. The latest release of the ALZ Accelerator simplifies the bootstrapping and provisioning of cloud platforms, covering everything from source control repositories and pipelines to Azure resources for platform landing zones. Additionally, it includes a comprehensive set of policies designed to establish essential guardrails for the entire environment.

In this blog post, I will share my experience implementing this new accelerator in my organization. I will compare it with the original accelerator (now referred to as “classic”), highlight the pros and cons of the design choices, and discuss areas where we applied additional customizations, explaining the rationale behind these decisions.