This document 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.
Instead of tracking individual resources across various projects or products, you can use the integrated, application-centric experience in Google Cloud to group and manage related resources together as registered applications.
- Manage consistent application designs, deployments, and updates using application templates.
- Gain a comprehensive view of application health, performance, security posture, and cost.
- Improve governance by assigning ownership and applying policies at the application level.
- Accelerate troubleshooting and impact analysis with a clear understanding of resource dependencies.
- Use Gemini Cloud Assist for tasks such as application design, cost optimization, and troubleshooting. Gemini Cloud Assist uses application resource relationship data as context for insights and responses.
Applications
An application acts as a logical grouping of components, including services and workloads, which collectively provide a specific business functionality. The following example shows a three-tier web application with a Cloud Run frontend service, a Cloud Run backend service, and a Cloud SQL database.
App Hub provides a foundational data model for your applications on Google Cloud and acts as the central registry for your applications. You can register an application by using App Hub to discover and group existing resources together, or by using Application Design Center to design and deploy a new application that is automatically registered in App Hub.
You can then operate and optimize your application, with AI assistance available to support you.
Key components
The following diagram illustrates key components of Application-centric Google Cloud.
The numbers in the diagram reference the following descriptions:
Resources: Applications in App Hub represent groupings of Google Cloud resources, which are 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 by configuring an app-enabled folder.
For more information about the application concepts and the application model, see Key concepts and Data handling.
Application design and deployment:
Application Design Center: Design and deploy new applications using Google templates based on best practices or your own custom templates. Create your application using the design canvas, import Terraform modules, or use Gemini Cloud Assist to help you with the design.
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.
Observability: Google Cloud Observability products provide telemetry data across Google Cloud. Monitor applications, agents, and MCP servers, and optimize usage with Application Monitoring 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.
Cost optimization: App Optimize API helps you understand your Google Cloud spending and resource usage.
- View cost trends and utilization changes in Cloud Hub and Cost Explorer for services and workloads. Cloud Hub also provides recommendations to reduce costs and insights from Gemini Cloud Assist about usage changes related to recent cost changes.
- Use App Optimize API directly for trend analysis or to join cost data with other business data.
Security and compliance: Security Command Center integrates with other Google Cloud products to help you assess security posture and enforce security policies. You can assess compliance and enforce policies before application deployment in Application Design Center. You can also view findings for all registered applications in Security Command Center.
Insights: Cloud Hub gives you a centralized view of operational data and insights from your applications. You can view aggregated data to manage your applications proactively, including:
- Alerts and incidents.
- Security and compliance findings.
- Cost and utilization, including Gemini Cloud Assist insights about recent cost changes.
- Maintenance activities.
- Recent Cloud Run and GKE deployments and configuration drift from your Application Design Center templates.
You can also run queries to correlate data including observability, security, and deployment data. The results appear as an interactive topology graph that help you to troubleshoot or assess impact faster.
For more information, see the Cloud Hub overview.
AI assistance: Get AI-powered support from Gemini Cloud Assist, for tasks such as:
Design applications. Use natural language to iteratively design an application on the Application Design Center canvas or download suggested architecture as Terraform code.
Gemini Cloud Assist also supports MCP integration with IDEs and can recommend application deployment architectures based on an analysis of your local code.
Troubleshooting. When you start an investigation from one of the supported entry-points, Gemini Cloud Assist uses the context of the entry point to help you collect relevant information.
Gemini Cloud Assist uses resource relationship information from App Topology and the content that is visible on your Google Cloud console page to provide more relevant and accurate responses to your prompts.
For more information, see the Gemini Cloud Assist overview.
Data handling
You define which resources App Hub can manage by configuring a management project, a Google Cloud project that centralizes all application management tasks and metadata.
The management project for your boundary stores App Hub and Application Design Center data and enables the necessary APIs for application management.
Data stored in the management project
The management project stores the following data about your applications:
- App Hub data: The complete logical model for all applications in the boundary, 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.
To view logs, metrics, and traces for application resources under an app-enabled folder, you must also configure the observability scope so that all your application telemetry data is visible from the management project.
Deleting a management project
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.
Application management APIs
When you set up a management project, required 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 required and recommended APIs, see Enable APIs on the management project.
Organizing resources
The following diagram shows an example of how resources can be organized for application management. In this case, two folders (Business Unit 1 and Business Unit 2) 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 (Business Unit 1) also includes a sub-folder (Business Sub-unit 1), 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.
For more information about structuring your resources, see Best practices for application management.
What's next
- Learn more about App Hub
- Choose your application setup model
- Learn more about Application Design Center
- Learn more about Cloud Hub
- Prepare for application management