Application Design Center now GA

Earlier this year, we unveiled a big investment in platform and developer team productivity, with the launch of Application Design Center, helping them streamline the design and deployment of cloud application infrastructure, while ensuring applications are secure, reliable, and aligned with best practices. And today, Application Design Center is generally available.

We built Application Design Center to put applications at the center of your cloud experience, with a visual, canvas-style and AI-powered approach to design and modify Terraform-backed application templates. It also offers full lifecycle management that’s aligned with DevOps best practices across application design and deployment.

Application Design Center is a core component of our application-centric cloud experience. When you use Application Design Center to design and deploy your application infrastructure, your applications are easily discoverable, observable, and manageable. Application Design Center works in concert with App Hub to automatically register application deployments, enabling a unified view and control plane for your application portfolio, and Cloud Hub, to provide operational insights for your applications.

“Google Application Design Center is a valuable enabler for Platform Engineering, providing a structured approach to harmonizing resource creation in Google Cloud Platform. By aligning tools, processes, and technologies, it streamlines workflows, reducing friction between development, operations, and other teams. This harmonization enhances collaboration, accelerates delivery, and ensures consistency across Google Cloud environments.” – Ervis Duraj, Principal Engineer, MediaMarktSaturn Technology

The gateway to an app-centric cloud

Our goal with Application Design Center is for you to innovate more, and administer less. It consists of four key elements to help you minimize administrative overhead and maximize efficiency, so you can design and deploy applications with integrated best practices and essential guardrails. Let’s take a closer look.

1. Terraform components and application templates 
Develop applications faster with our growing library of opinionated application templates. These provide well-architected patterns and pre-built components, including innovative “AI inference templates” to help you leverage AI to create dynamic and intelligent application foundations. As an example, at launch, Application Design Center provides opinionated templates for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters (Standard, Autopilot and NodePool) to run AI inference workloads using a variety of LLM models, as well as for enterprise-grade production clusters or single-region web app clusters. 

You can also ingest and manage your existing Terraform configurations (“Bring your own Terraform”) directly from Git repositories. Once imported, you can use Application Design Center to design with your own Terraform, or in combination with Google-provided Terraform, to create standardized, opinionated infrastructure patterns for sharing and reuse across your application teams.