Prepare for application lifecycle management

Traditional cloud resource hierarchies can obscure resource relationships and complicate operational tasks. Organizing resources into applications and managing them by your business functions can help you address those challenges and gain a clear view of infrastructure interactions.

This guide outlines workflows you can use to design, deploy, and maintain applications. We recommend these workflows to help you operate your Google Cloud resources as logical units that align with your business structure. You can apply these practices whether you are deploying new application infrastructure or organizing existing resources into applications.

The foundation of the application management approach that this guide proposes is the app-enabled folder or the host project, depending on your setup model. Those resources act as the administrative boundary for your applications and serve as a central repository for all your application metadata, providing a unified experience across various tools.

For more information about key products, concepts, and features that let you manage applications in Google Cloud, see Application-centric Google Cloud.

Recommended use cases

The scenarios described in this guide use two main Google Cloud products:

• App Hub: The central registry for all your applications, providing visibility into their services and workloads and enabling governance at the application level.
• Application Design Center: Your canvas for architecting, designing, and deploying new application infrastructure using pre-approved templates and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

These products work together to provide a seamless transition from design and grouping to deployment and ongoing operations. Choose one of the following cases that best matches your goal:

• Register existing resources to create an application: Group existing services and workloads from your cloud infrastructure into an application to gain unified visibility, governance, and operational control. This option lets you start managing your current resources as logical units.
• Create applications from published templates: Deploy new, standardized application infrastructure using pre-built templates, ensuring compliance with organizational best practices and providing immediate visibility.
• Create a reusable template from a running application: Capture the architecture of a successful, running application as a reusable, governed template to enable consistent and compliant self-service deployments for other teams and new applications.
• Optimize an existing application with design recommendations: Analyze the existing architecture of an application using application insights and design recommendations. Then, model and deploy architectural changes on Application Design Center to improve cost, security, or performance.

While these are recommended use cases, you can adapt product features and capabilities to meet your specific individual requirements.