Application-centric Google Cloud

This page provides a conceptual overview of Application-centric Google Cloud, its core components, 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 resources 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 your resources. You can shift your focus from individual infrastructure components to the application as a whole, enabling application management in a way that aligns with business functionality and day-to-day operations.

Key concepts

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

In the context of Application-centric Google Cloud, application management is understood through the definition of these key concepts:

  • App Hub application (or simply application): The fundamental organizing principle of Application-centric Google Cloud. An application is a logical grouping of services and workloads that together deliver end-to-end business functionality, such as an ecommerce website, a data processing pipeline, or a chatbot.
  • Service: A network or API interface that exposes functionality to clients, such as a load balancer's forwarding rule.
  • Workload: A binary deployment that performs a distinct business function unit, for example, a managed instance group (MIG) or a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) deployment.

Resource organization concepts

To enable application management functionalities, your resources must be within a Google Cloud folder that is specially configured for application management. The following concepts define the data model for applications that group resources across multiple Google Cloud projects:

  • The app-enabled folder: A standard Google Cloud folder where you enable application management. This folder acts as an administrative boundary for applications and contains a management project to store application metadata and configurations. You use Resource Manager to enable and manage an app-enabled folder.

  • The management project: A Google-created project within the app-enabled folder that acts as a central repository for all metadata related to your application-centric experience. It stores not just high-level application attributes but the entire application model, including:

    • 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: Resources 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 GKE clusters or load balancers, will continue to exist, but their logical grouping and relationships within App Hub will be lost.

When you configure an app-enabled folder, APIs for application management are automatically enabled on the management project. These include APIs for App Hub, App 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 how resources map to applications in management projects of app-enabled folders:

App Hub data model based on app-enabled folders. The diagram includes two folders, each representing a business unit with its resources grouped as services and workloads. The first folder also includes a sub-folder that represents a separate business sub-unit and various independent projects with resources. All the folders are app-enabled and hence have their distinct management projects.
Figure 1. Resource organization model in Application-centric Google Cloud.

Benefits of application-centric management

Organizing Google Cloud resources into applications 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 resources 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, such as services and workloads. You can group resources from multiple projects within an app-enabled folder, which you enable and manage with Resource Manager. The management project within the app-enabled folder stores App Hub and App Design Center data and enables the necessary APIs for application management. For more information about these concepts, see Resource organization concepts.

  2. Application design and deployment:

    • App 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 App Design Center overview.
    • App Hub: Organize resources in your app-enabled folder into applications to gain a unified view of your services and workloads. For more information, see the App Hub overview.

    Whether you use App 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 resources, 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 App Design Center, investigating issues, and optimizing your resources. For more information, see the Gemini Cloud Assist overview.

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