Set up Application Design Center

This document guides administrators through the one-time setup for Application Design Center. Completing this setup allows your organization to start designing and managing applications using App Design Center.

In the setup process, you as an administrator will do the following:

Enable application management on a Google Cloud folder.
Create your App Design Center space. This step configures the necessary services and resources, including the following:
- A Cloud Storage bucket for Terraform code storage.
- A default private catalog and access to a Google-managed catalog.
- Required APIs such as Infrastructure Manager, App Hub, and Service Usage.

Before you begin

You must have the following roles:

To enable application management on a folder and create an underlying management project, you must have the Folder Admin (resourcemanager.folderAdmin) role on the parent resource.
To enable billing on the management project, you must have the required billing permissions on the billing account and management project.
To complete the App Design Center setup, you must have the following roles on the management project:
- Application Design Center Admin (roles/designcenter.admin).
- Application Admin (roles/designcenter.applicationAdmin).

You must have an organization resource, from which you do one of the following:

Create a folder and enable application management.
Select an existing app-enabled folder.

Enable application management on a folder

You use App Design Center in an app-enabled folder, which lets you define, group, and manage applications. In your app-enabled folder, you can create a resource hierarchy and control access based on your organizational structure and team responsibilities.

When you enable application management, the system creates a new management project in the folder. You use the management project to manage quota and billing for descendant projects associated with the app-enabled folder. You can create additional projects in the app-enabled folder to store the resources that you create with App Design Center.

For more information and steps to enable app management, see the following:

Create a space and enable APIs

Before you and your development team start using App Design Center, you must complete an automated initial setup to create a space and make sure that the following required APIs are enabled:

App Design Center: Design and share deployable application architectures on a canvas or through chat.
Infrastructure Manager: Automate the deployment and management of Google Cloud infrastructure resources using Terraform.
App Hub: Organize your Google Cloud resources in an application-centric way.
Service Usage: List and manage Google Cloud APIs and services.

To create your space and enable APIs, do the following:

To set up App Design Center, do the following:

Go to the Application Design Center Overview page.

Go to Overview
On the Application Design Center Overview page, click Select folder and select your app-enabled folder.
Click Set up ADC.
In the My space name field, enter a name for your space. You can't edit this name later.
Click Complete setup. The system enables the APIs, and creates the storage bucket and space.

Use your own storage bucket

The setup process creates a Cloud Storage bucket to store application details and generated Terraform. Alternatively, you can use your own bucket to store application information. For example, you might use an existing bucket if your organization policies prevent you from creating new storage buckets.

To set up App Design Center to use your own Cloud Storage bucket, you must use the App Design Center API. Do the following:

Make sure that you have access to use APIs. For more information, see Set up API access.
Make sure that your bucket is in the same management project where you plan to create your space.
Make sure that you have the following permissions on the bucket:
- storage.buckets.get
- storage.objects.create
For more information, see IAM permissions for Cloud Storage.
Identify the bucket name.
Create your API call using the projects.locations.spaces resource:
1. Specify your bucket name in the gcs_bucket field. For example, if the bucket URI is gs://my-bucket, the bucket name is my-bucket.
2. Use the projects.locations.spaces.create method to create the space.
Your space is created, your bucket is used as the storage location for application information, the required APIs are enabled, and the App Design Center setup process is completed.