Once you’ve chosen Google Cloud as your platform, the next big step is laying a strong foundation. Without it, even the most innovative applications can run into scalability, security, or compliance challenges.
Think of the landing zone as the blueprint of your cloud environment. It provides structure, separation of responsibilities, and guardrails to ensure that your team can move fast without compromising on security or governance.
In this article, we’ll walk through how to design and implement a landing zone on Google Cloud, using the example of a fintech company that needs to process payments safely and efficiently.
A Landing Zone is a starting template for establishing a secure, scalable, and manageable infrastructure on Google Cloud. It is essentially a foundation. it enables you to systematically design all critical aspects, such as security, networking, identity management, policy, and cost control, from the outset. This ensures you have a solid infrastructure in place before you begin developing your application.
The components of a landing zone can be grouped into several categories:
A separate Google Cloud Project is created for each environment. IAM policies, budgets, and billing are managed separately.
Users, service accounts, and roles are defined using the principle of least privilege. For example, developers can only access the Dev environment, while only the operations team can access the Prod environment.
A separate VPC or isolated subnets within the same VPC are defined for each environment. Private service access is established via Private Service Access, VPN, or Interconnect.
Cloud Armor: DDoS protection
Secret Manager: Management of sensitive data such as API keys, passwords, and private keys
KMS (Key Management Service): Cryptographic key management
Audit Logs & SCC (Security Command Centre): Traceability and compliance control
Applications are automatically moved from Dev → Test → Prod using Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins.
Terraform or Deployment Manager is preferred for Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Cloud Build → Tests → Artifact Registry → Cloud Run/Kubernetes Engine deployment
Cloud Monitoring & Cloud Logging: Metrics and logs are centrally monitored for each environment.
Alerting: Email or Slack alerts for critical errors
One of the most important principles in a landing zone is environment separation. Each stage of development has its own purpose:
This separation isn’t bureaucracy; it’s risk management. Without it, small mistakes in development could easily cascade into outages or compliance breaches in production.
Security begins with access control. The principle of least privilege must be strictly applied. A developer working in Dev should not have rights to query live customer data in Prod. Likewise, service accounts should be narrowly scoped to their tasks.
For example, a service account with read-only permissions to BigQuery cannot accidentally delete or modify datasets. Managing IAM policies centrally at the folder or organisation level avoids inconsistency and helps enforce compliance across all projects.
The network architecture serves as the foundation for secure and efficient traffic management within the Landing Zone. To ensure strong isolation and controlled connectivity:
Shared VPC Model: A shared Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is provisioned as the central networking layer, enabling standardised governance and consistent policies across all environments.
Strict Environment Separation: Clear boundaries are enforced between environments (Development, Staging, and Production). For example, the Development environment cannot directly communicate with the Production environment, minimising the risk of unauthorised access, data leakage, or unintentional interference.
Firewall Rules: Network firewall rules are defined with the principle of least privilege. Only approved ports, services, and protocols are allowed, ensuring that each workload can communicate only with explicitly permitted resources.
Controlled Access to Data: Developers working in lower environments (such as Dev or Test) are prevented from reaching sensitive production systems, reducing the risk of accidental exposure to live data.
Restrictions: Backend services are designed with no direct public ingress or unrestricted egress. Instead, outbound traffic to external third-party APIs must pass through a secure proxy layer, providing centralised monitoring, logging, and control. This enhances isolation and prevents data leaks.
Automation plays a critical role in moving code from development to production. There are two key elements in this process:
A single Artifact Registry repository is used for all environments. Environment separation is achieved using a tagging strategy.
For example:
This prevents the classic “works in Staging, breaks in Prod” scenario and makes rollbacks simple.
A pipeline should be set up using Cloud Build or GitHub Actions. The process typically works as follows:
This process ensures quality while maintaining fast and reliable deployments.
Managing cloud resources manually is a recipe for errors. Therefore, all infrastructure should be managed using the infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach with Terraform.
Each environment has its own configuration files, while shared modules enforce consistency across projects.
Recurring resources are defined under shared modules (`modules/`)
Integrating Terraform with Atlantis adds automation and governance. Atlantis automatically applies Terraform changes via pull requests (PR).
This workflow eliminates risky manual commands, ensures all changes are peer-reviewed, and creates a clear audit trail of who changed what, when.
In fintech, downtime or hidden errors are unacceptable. Observability ensures you always know what’s happening. To achieve this:
The diagram represents a multi-environment GCP architecture for a fintech application built with a Flutter mobile client and backend services such as payments and wallets.
A single shared project (e.g., fintech-apigee-shared) centralizes APIGEE management and avoids redundancy.
Key benefits:
Create four projects: fintech-dev, fintech-test, fintech-acc, fintech-prod under environment-specific folders within the Landing Zone.
Advantages:
All resources - projects, APIGEE, VPCs, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, IAM, BigQuery, should be managed as code for reproducibility and auditability.
Recommended setup:
Maintain proxies centrally, with environment separation enforced through configuration.
A typical CI/CD pipeline could look like this:
This ensures that the exact same artifact tested in staging runs in production, minimising rebuild risks and simplifying rollbacks.
By combining Terraform, APIGEE, Cloud Build, and CI/CD pipelines, you get:
A well-structured Google Cloud Landing Zone isn’t just relevant for fintech. Whether you’re building an e-commerce platform, a SaaS product, or a data-driven application, the principles remain the same.
By starting with a solid Landing Zone, your team can focus on delivering features and value, instead of worrying about infrastructure pitfalls. This approach lays the groundwork for growth, innovation, and resilience on Google Cloud.
Not sure where to start? Feel free to reach out, we’ll be happy to discuss your project.