Comparison
Cloud landing zonevsPaved road
Cloud landing zone
a new team gets an account that already has the network, the logging, the guardrails and the billing tags applied.
A pre-baked account or project structure with networking, identity, logging, policy and cost controls already in place, issued rather than assembled. It exists because the alternative is every team making the same twenty decisions differently, and then a compliance exercise discovering that. It is the account-level equivalent of a golden path, and like a golden path its value collapses if teams routinely need to step outside it.
Full entry →Paved road
doing it the standard way gets you logging, tracing, secrets and a pipeline for free; doing it your own way is allowed and unsupported.
A well-supported default route through the platform that is easier than the alternatives, without being mandatory. The consent matters: the road is chosen because it is genuinely faster, and the escape hatch exists so unusual cases do not have to fight. Its health is measured by what fraction of new services take it, and a paved road nobody uses is a statement about the road.
Full entry →