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…
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.
2. **AI-powered design for rapid application designing and prototyping **Application Design Center integrates with Google’s Gemini Cloud Assist Design Agent, empowering you to design actual, deployable application infrastructure application templates on Google Cloud that you can export as Terraform infrastructure-as-code.
With Gemini Cloud Assist, you can describe your application design intents using natural language. In return, Gemini interactively generates multi-product application template suggestions, complete with visual architecture diagrams and summarized benefits. You can then refine these proposals through multi-turn reasoning or by directly manipulating the architecture within the Application Design Center canvas.
Additionally, all designs that you create with Gemini are automatically observable, optimizable, and enabled for troubleshooting assistance during runtime, thanks to their tight integration with Gemini Cloud Assist.
3. **A secure, sharable catalog of application templates with full lifecycle management **Platform admins can curate a collection of application templates built from Google’s best-practice components. This provides developers a trusted, self-service experience from which they can quickly discover and deploy compliant applications. Tight integration with Cloud Hub transforms these governed templates into a live operational command center, complete with unified visibility into the health and deployment status of the resulting applications. This closes the critical loop between design and runtime, so that your production environments reflect your organization’s approved architectural standards.
Also, Application Design Center’s robust application template revisions serve as an immutable audit trail. It automatically detects and flags configuration drift between your intended designs and deployed applications, so that developers can remediate unauthorized changes or safely push approved configuration updates. This helps ensure continuous state consistency and compliance from Day 1 and through the subsequent evolution of your application.
4. **GitOps integration automating developers’ day-to-day software design lifecycle tasks **By integrating Application Design Center into existing CI/CD workflows, platform teams empower developers to own the complete software delivery lifecycle right from their IDE. Developers can leverage compliant application and infrastructure (IaC) code using Application Design Center application templates.
Further, every infrastructure decision made through Application Design Center is committed to code, versioned, and auditable. Specifically, developers can download the application IaC template from Application Design Center and import it into their app repos (the single source of truth), clone their repo, and edit the Terraform directly in their local IDEs. Any modifications go through a Git pull request for review. Once approved, this automatically triggers the existing CI/CD setup to build, test, and deploy both app and infra changes in lockstep. This unified approach minimizes friction, enforcing "golden paths" and providing an end-to-end automated pathway from a line of code in the IDE to a fully deployed change in production.
What’s new since preview
This GA launch is packed with features that users have been asking for. We’re excited to share powerful new capabilities: enterprise-grade governance and security with public APIs and gcloud CLI support; full compatibility with VPC service controls; bring your own Terraform and GitOps support for integration with your existing application patterns and automation pipelines; agentic application patterns using GKE templates (Standard, Autopilot and NodePool); and finally, a simplified onboarding experience with app-managed project support, making Application Design Center an AI-powered engine for your applications on Google Cloud.
Get started today
To help you get started, Google provides a growing library of curated Google application templates built by experts. These templates combine multiple Google Cloud products and best practices to serve common use cases, which you can configure for deployment, and view as infrastructure as code in-line. Platform teams can then create and securely share the catalogs and collaborate with teammates on designs and self-service deployment for developers. For enterprises with existing Terraform patterns and assets, Application Design Center interoperates by enabling their import and reuse within its native design and configuration experience.
Ready to experience the power of Application Design Center? You can learn more about ADC and get started building in minutes using the quickstart. You can start building your first AI-powered application template in minutes, free of cost, and quickly deploy applications with working code. For deeper insights, explore the comprehensive public documentation here. We can’t wait to see how you innovate with the Application Design Center!
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