Landing Zone in OCI

How to Design a Landing Zone in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

When organizations adopt cloud, one of the first challenges is: “How do we set up a secure, scalable, and well-governed foundation?”

In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the answer is to build a Landing Zone. A landing zone is a pre-defined environment that provides a secure, governed, and scalable foundation where workloads can be deployed with confidence.

What is a Landing Zone?

A landing zone is a blueprint for cloud adoption. Instead of creating resources in an ad-hoc manner, a landing zone provides:

• Security by design – Policies, guardrails, and IAM roles are already defined.

• Governance – Clear separation of environments, budgets, and monitoring.

• Scalability – A structure that can grow with new projects and teams.

• Compliance – Configurations aligned with industry or organizational standards.

Think of it as laying down the foundation of a house before building the rooms.

Key Design Principles for an OCI Landing Zone

When designing your landing zone, keep these principles in mind:

1. Isolation of Workloads

   • Use compartments to logically isolate projects, applications, and environments (e.g., DEV, TEST, PROD).

   • Apply compartment-level policies to control access and ensure governance.

2. Identity and Access Management (IAM)

   • Define groups and policies aligned with job roles (e.g., network admins, DBAs, developers).

   • Use least privilege access principles.

   • Integrate with Identity Providers (IdPs) if using SSO.

3. Networking

   • Design VCNs (Virtual Cloud Networks) for different workloads.

   • Use subnets (public and private) with proper route tables and security lists.

   • Connect on-premises networks via FastConnect or VPN Connect.

   • Consider hub-and-spoke (transit routing) for enterprise setups.

4. Security

   • Enable Cloud Guard to detect misconfigurations.

   • Use Vault for encryption keys and secrets management.

   • Define WAF (Web Application Firewall) policies for internet-facing apps.

5. Monitoring and Logging

   • Set up OCI Logging for auditing.

   • Use Monitoring and Alarms to track performance and costs.

   • Centralize audit logs for compliance.

6. Cost Management

   • Define budgets and alerts for each compartment.

   • Tag resources (e.g., by project, environment, owner) for cost visibility.

7. Automation

   • Use Resource Manager (Terraform) to deploy landing zone components as code.

   • Automate policies and monitoring to ensure consistency.

Example OCI Landing Zone Architecture

Here’s a typical landing zone setup:

• Root Compartment

  • Shared Services Compartment (network, security, monitoring)

  • Workload Compartments (per application or environment: DEV, TEST, PROD)

• Networking: Hub VCN with security services, spoke VCNs for workloads

• IAM: Groups aligned to roles, policies scoped to compartments

• Security: Cloud Guard, Vault, WAF

• Monitoring & Logging: Centralized in shared services

Steps to Build Your OCI Landing Zone

1. Plan – Define organizational structure, environments, and governance rules.

2. Design – Map compartments, IAM, and networking architecture.

3. Deploy – Use OCI Resource Manager (Terraform) templates to deploy.

4. Secure – Enable Cloud Guard, Vault, and auditing.

5. Monitor – Set up logging, monitoring, and alarms.

6. Iterate – Adjust as new projects, teams, and compliance needs arise.

Conclusion

Designing a landing zone in OCI ensures your cloud adoption is secure, scalable, and compliant from day one. It prevents the chaos of unmanaged cloud sprawl and gives your teams a solid foundation to innovate faster.

Whether you’re just starting your OCI journey or scaling enterprise workloads, investing time in a landing zone design pays off in the long run.