Lightning-fast infrastructure playbook

If your infrastructure still feels like a patchwork of tactical fixes, this field note summarises the blueprint I now apply with most enterprise clients.

1. Stabilise the landing zone

Start with observability. Without up-to-date telemetry, every decision is a guess.

• Deploy a thin agent on legacy hosts for baseline metrics.
• Map dependencies using packet captures during low-traffic windows.
• Enable "safe mode" automation that can roll back any change in under 2 minutes.

Once the ground is stable, design the target cloud landing zone. Pair Azure Landing Zones with zero-trust network segmentation; you get governance guardrails without losing speed.

2. Automate the runway

Infrastructure-as-code is mandatory, but velocity comes from the surrounding tooling:

1. Use reusable Terraform modules for the boring pieces (VNets, peering, identity).
2. Chain your pipelines with automated compliance gates (Policy as Code).
3. Publish a decision log so stakeholders understand why a control exists.

That video is an anonymised walkthrough showing the migration of 250+ workloads. Notice how the rollback demo takes seconds because state is idempotent.

3. Turn operations into a product

Treat ops as a product suite with clear service levels:

az monitor metrics list \
  --resource-group core-services \
  --name "Percentage CPU" \
  --interval PT1M

Give teams self-service runbooks in a portal. You retain governance, but engineers ship value without waiting on tickets.

Download the full checklist

The complete checklist (with templates and policy samples) is reserved for customers, but feel free to reach out if you want a guided workshop.