Application-centric Google Cloud

This page provides a conceptual overview of Application-centric Google Cloud, its core products, and how they work together to streamline the entire application management lifecycle.

As cloud applications become increasingly complex, managing their underlying infrastructure can pose a significant challenge. Additionally, these applications often consist of numerous components spread across multiple Google Cloud projects. This distribution can hinder developers and operators from maintaining a clear and unified view, thereby complicating tasks such as monitoring, troubleshooting, and cost management.

To address this challenge, Google Cloud offers an integrated, application-centric experience for deploying, managing, and operating application components. You can shift your focus from your individual infrastructure resources to the application as a whole, enabling application management in a way that aligns with business functionality and day-to-day operations.

Key concepts for application management

At the core of the application-centric experience is the concept of an App Hub application. An application acts as a logical grouping of components, including services and workloads, which collectively provide a specific business functionality.

To enable application management, you define an application management boundary, which is the collection of projects whose underlying Google Cloud resources App Hub can discover and register in applications. This boundary for resource discovery is established by designating a Google Cloud project to act as the management project.

For detailed definitions of all Application-centric Google Cloud key concepts, see Key concepts.

Data handling in resource organization

The management project stores not just high-level application attributes but the entire application model, including the following:

  • App Hub data: The complete logical model of your applications, including the definitions of and relationships between applications, services, and workloads. This model also includes metadata like application owners, criticality, and environment.
  • Application Design Center data: Elements such as application templates, catalogs, and spaces that are used to design and deploy new applications.

If the management project is deleted, all of this application model data is permanently lost. The underlying infrastructure resources, such as your Google Kubernetes Engine clusters or load balancers, will continue to exist, but their logical grouping and relationships within App Hub will be lost.

When you set up a management project, APIs for application management are automatically enabled. These include APIs for App Hub, Application Design Center, Google Cloud Observability, and their associated API dependencies. For more information about these automatically enabled APIs, see Enable APIs on a management project.

The following diagram shows an example of how resources can be organized for application management. In this case, two folders are attached to their own management projects, defining separate application management boundaries. Each folder represents a business unit with its resources registered as services and workloads in applications. The first folder also includes a sub-folder, which represents a separate business sub-unit, and various independent projects with their own resources. All the folders are configured for application management and hence have their own distinct management projects.

An example resource model for Application-centric Google Cloud, showing how folders and projects can be organized within application management boundaries.
Figure 1. An example resource organization model in Application-centric Google Cloud.

Benefits of application-centric management

Organizing Google Cloud resources and registering them in applications as services and workloads offers an alternative to tracking individual resources across various projects or products. This approach lets you do the following:

  • Manage consistent application designs, deployments, and updates using application templates.
  • Gain a comprehensive view of your application's health, performance, and cost.
  • Streamline operations by managing related components as a single unit.
  • Improve governance by assigning ownership and applying policies at the application level.
  • Accelerate troubleshooting with a clear understanding of resource dependencies.

The application management lifecycle

Managing your applications in Google Cloud follows a logical lifecycle. You first define and organize your applications, then you operate and optimize them, with AI assistance available at every stage.

The following diagram illustrates the key products and features that let you manage applications in Google Cloud:

Relationships between application-centric products and features.
Figure 2. Relationships between application-centric products and features.

The numbers in the diagram reference the following descriptions:

  1. Resources: Applications in Google Cloud represent groupings of Google Cloud resources, registered as services and workloads. You define which resources App Hub can manage by configuring an application management boundary with a management project. For example, you can define the boundary at the folder level. The management project stores App Hub and Application Design Center data and enables the necessary APIs for application management. For more information about these concepts, see Key concepts and Data handling in resource organization.

  2. Application design and deployment:

    • Application Design Center: Design and deploy new applications using prebuilt or custom templates that you can update. Deploying an application creates new Google Cloud resources and registers those resources and your application to App Hub. For more information, see the Application Design Center overview.
    • App Hub: Organize existing resources within your application management boundary into applications to gain a unified view of your services and workloads. For more information, see the App Hub overview.

    Whether you use Application Design Center to build a new application or App Hub to organize your existing resources, the result is a defined application that is cataloged in App Hub and serves as the basis for unified operations.

  3. Application-centric observability: Monitor applications and optimize usage with Google Cloud Observability products and features:

    • Monitor application health and performance with metrics, logs, and traces.
    • Set up alerts based on metrics and logs.
    • Analyze costs and resource usage in Cost Explorer.

  4. Application insights: Use Cloud Hub to get a centralized view of operational data and insights for your applications and their components, including alerts, incidents, and maintenance activities, to manage your applications proactively. For more information, see the Cloud Hub overview.

  5. Application assistance: Get AI-powered support from Gemini Cloud Assist with tasks such as designing applications in Application Design Center, investigating issues, and optimizing your resources. For more information, see the Gemini Cloud Assist overview.

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