App Hub overview

As you develop your cloud infrastructure, you might organize your resources across multiple projects. This approach can make your resources difficult to manage and organize. App Hub provides an application-centric way to group these resources, helping you align your infrastructure with your business functions.

App Hub acts as the foundational data model and central registry for your applications on Google Cloud. It creates a single source of truth that clarifies resource ownership, dependencies, and business context. This, in turn, supports other Google Cloud services with the application-centric context they need. For more information about this application-centric model and its resource organization, see Application-centric Google Cloud.

This document provides a conceptual overview of App Hub to help you understand its features and benefits before you set up or administer it.

Why use App Hub?

By shifting the focus from individual infrastructure components to the applications they form, App Hub helps you streamline governance and operations at scale.

App Hub helps you implement the following:

  • Organize and catalog your applications: Group scattered resources from one or more projects into logical applications. You can then categorize these applications with attributes like owners, business criticality, and environment to improve discoverability and accountability. For more information, see Support discoverability and governance.

  • Create a unified view for your teams: By defining an application in App Hub, you provide essential context to other Google Cloud services. For example, you enable the following capabilities:

    • Central view of operations and insights in Cloud Hub, which displays alerts, incidents, and performance data in an application context.
    • AI-powered assistance from Gemini Cloud Assist, which uses App Hub's data model to help you design, operate, and troubleshoot your applications.
    • Application monitoring with Google Cloud Observability to help you troubleshoot errors and improve performance by displaying telemetry data for your applications and their resources.

  • Clarify resource ownership and dependencies: Understand how your applications are composed and how their components depend on each other. This feature helps developers and operators visualize application architecture, identify owners, and resolve issues.

To learn more about how App Hub fits into the broader application lifecycle, see Application-centric Google Cloud.

Concepts and data model

App Hub is built on a data model based on the following key concepts: applications, services, and workloads. While these terms are common, App Hub uses them in a specific way. The following table compares the App Hub definition with common industry usage:

Concept App Hub definition Common industry usage
Application A logical grouping of services and workloads that together deliver a business function. Can refer to a single deployable unit, a codebase, or a broad system.
Service A network or API interface that exposes functionality to clients, such as a load balancer. Often refers to a microservice, a deployable component with its own business logic and data.
Workload A binary deployment that performs a distinct business function unit, like a GKE deployment or a Compute Engine instance group. A more general term for any process or component that consumes computing resources.

For more information about these central concepts, see Key concepts.

You can scope App Hub applications based on your geographic distribution requirements. You can designate the following scopes:

  • Global applications can group services and workloads from multiple Google Cloud regions.
  • Regional applications contain resources that all reside within a single region.

This choice impacts which resources you can register and can be important for data residency requirements. For a detailed comparison to help you choose the right scope, see Global and regional applications.

Support discoverability and governance

To enrich the data model, App Hub lets you expose properties and attributes to support application discoverability, accountability, and resource governance. Defining these values as application metadata helps you filter, manage, and apply policies to your resources at scale.

The following are the definitions and features of properties and attributes:

  • Properties are immutable fields that describe the underlying infrastructure of a registered service or workload, such as its project ID, location, or zone. These are discovered automatically and cannot be edited in App Hub.

  • Attributes are mutable, user-defined metadata that you can apply to applications, services, and workloads to organize and govern them. Key attributes include:

    • Owners: Contact information for developer, operator, and business teams. The supported owner types are:

      • developer_owners: Development team that owns development and coding.
      • operator_owners: Operator team that ensures runtime and operations integrity.
      • business_owners: Business team that ensures quality and user expectations are met.

    • Criticality: The importance of the resource to your business. The supported values are:

      • Mission critical
      • High
      • Medium
      • Low

    • Environment: The lifecycle stage of the resource. The supported values are:

      • Production
      • Staging
      • Test
      • Development

The App Hub resource model

To enable application-centric features, App Hub uses a model based on the following Google Cloud folders and projects:

  • Recommended: App-enabled folder: A standard Google Cloud folder configured for application management. This folder acts as an administrative boundary for your applications. When a folder is app-enabled, Google Cloud automatically creates a management project within it. This Google-created project acts as a central repository for all your application models and metadata. This is the recommended path for using Application-centric Google Cloud products and is required to access the full offering of application management features.

  • Host project: A Google Cloud project that you can use to group services and workloads as applications in App Hub, but that doesn't support access to the full offering of application management features.

For more information about the application-centric resource model, see Resource organization concepts. For detailed instructions on getting started, see Choose your setup model.

What's next