GCP – Delivering an application-centric, AI-powered cloud for developers and operators

Today we’re unveiling new AI capabilities to help cloud developers and operators at every step of the application lifecycle. We are doing this by:

• Putting applications at the center of your cloud experience, abstracting away the infrastructure complexities of the traditional cloud model. Now you can design, observe, secure, and optimize at the application level, rather than at the infrastructure level.

• Adding AI assistance everywhere in the application development lifecycle with new features in Gemini Code Assist and Gemini Cloud Assist. We’re introducing new agents, including an agent designed for complex workflows, to offload development tasks in your IDE. We’re also applying AI to management and operational tasks to make your entire application journey smarter and more productive.

The new application-centric cloud experience 

Applications are the engines of modern businesses. However, the traditional resource-centric cloud model introduces a huge amount of complexity to application design, deployment, and management, forcing developers to translate business requirements into lower-level infrastructure details, obscuring the application’s overall purpose and performance goals. Application components are spread across many systems and dashboards, making it hard to track performance, understand costs, and troubleshoot issues. Our application-centric approach helps you address these challenges, with a number of new services and expanded features.

Introducing Application Design Center

Our new service, Application Design Center, now in public preview, helps platform admins and developers streamline the design, deployment, and evolution of cloud applications, while helping ensure that they are secure, reliable, and aligned with best practices. In addition to APIs and the gcloud command line interface, Application Design Center provides a visual, canvas-style approach to designing and modifying application templates. It also lets you configure application templates for deployment, view infrastructure as code in-line, and collaborate with teammates on designs. Application deployments are automatically registered in App Hub for easy operations and troubleshooting.

Cloud Hub unifies visibility and control of your applications

The new Cloud Hub service is the central command center for your entire application landscape, allowing you to focus on what matters the most for your applications and workloads. It helps you manage the key aspects of your applications, with insights into deployments, health and troubleshooting, resource optimization, maintenance, quotas and reservations, and support cases. This unified view simplifies management and accelerates problem resolution. Cloud Hub is currently in public preview and accessible to all Google Cloud console users. Experience Cloud Hub here.

Expanding App Hub and app-centric observability

App Hub models your applications as interconnected services and workloads for an application-centric view, and is now integrated with over 20 Google Cloud products, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, and AlloyDB, strengthening the foundation of our application-centric experience. And we will continue to expand from here. 

Additionally, we are enhancing our application-centric observability capabilities with two new features: first, Application Monitoring, in public preview, which supports automatically tagging telemetry (logs, metrics, and traces) with application context, application-aware alerts, and out-of-the-box application dashboards; second, we’re introducing Cost Explorer to provide visibility into granular application costs and utilization metrics, allowing you to identify efficiency opportunities. Cost Explorer is currently in private preview; sign up here to try it out.

AI-assisted application development and management 

With Gemini Code Assist and Cloud Assist, we are focused on helping you accelerate application development and streamline your cloud operations across your entire software development lifecycle.

Gemini Code Assist: boost developer productivity

Gemini Code Assist already provides AI assistance in your favorite code editors – Android Studio, Firebase Studio, JetBrains, VS Code, and others. Today we’re announcing three new ways that Code Assist can help you as a software engineer:

• Agents that can translate natural language requests into multi-step, multi-file solutions

• New tools that make it easy to connect Code Assist to external services, third-party partners, or even other agents

• Gemini 2.5, with its enhanced coding capabilities, now available in Gemini Code Assist for individuals

Gemini Code Assist agents

Not long ago, Sundar Pichai shared that 25% of Google’s code is written by AI. Our customers are on a similar trajectory. Ampere from Renault Group, Broadcom, CGI, CME Group, PayPal, and Wipro use Code Assist today for writing code and developing applications. In fact, CME Group, which runs the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, states that Code Assist provides most of its developers more than 10.5 hours of productivity gain per month.

Getting an application to production involves a whole range of tasks beyond coding. That’s why we’re putting powerful new capabilities at your fingertips, with Gemini Code Assist agents designed to help you to tackle tasks across the entire software development lifecycle.

Gemini Code Assist’s agents can now help you do all kinds of common developer tasks:

1. Generate new software: Create applications from product specifications in Google Docs.

2. Migrate code: Perform code transformation from one language to another and code translation between language/framework versions.

3. Implement new features: Read issues assigned to users in GitHub and create code to address them. 

4. Execute code reviews: Provide code analysis and feedback on quality, best practices, and organizational style.

5. Generate tests: Create test cases, execute tests, and report results.

6. Perform AI testing: Conduct an evaluation of model inputs/outputs to identify and address potential content safety concerns.

7. Generate documentation: Write and update wiki-style documentation for entire repositories and provide full codebase Q/A.

When agents are doing work in the background, we know it’s important to be able to understand which tasks are underway and what they’ve completed. That’s why we created the Gemini Code Assist Kanban board, which lets you interact with our agents, review the workplan that Gemini creates to complete the tasks, and track the progress of the various jobs/requests.

Gemini Code Assist tools

To make your work in the IDE with Gemini Code Assist truly effective, you need easy access to context from outside sources. That’s why we built Gemini Code Assist tools, now in preview. These are prebuilt connections accessible within Gemini Code Assist’s chat that help you access information from Google apps and industry-leading tools from partners including Atlassian, Sentry, Snyk, and more.

More IDEs: Android and Firebase Studio

Gemini Code Assist helps you write, transform, and understand code directly in the IDE of your choice, and we’re excited to announce that this coverage is expanding. Gemini Code Assist is now available in Android Studio for professional developers who want AI coding assistance with enterprise security and privacy features.

In addition, we launched two new purpose-built agents for the Firebase platform powered by Gemini Code Assist: an App Prototyping agent within the new Firebase Studio development environment that turns your app ideas into fully functional prototypes, including the UI, backend code, and AI flows; and an App Testing agent within Firebase App Distribution that prepares mobile apps for production by generating, managing, and executing end-to-end tests. Both agents are currently in preview.

Gemini Cloud Assist: simplify application operations and management

Gemini Cloud Assist provides AI-powered assistance across the application lifecycle in the Google Cloud environment, helping developers, DevOps teams, cloud admins, and SREs manage applications more effectively and efficiently — from initial infrastructure design, deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting, to continuous optimization. Gemini Cloud Assist offers AI assistance through a chat interface, within purpose-built AI-guided workflows, and directly inside Google Cloud products. It is available both in the console, and via mobile. Gemini Cloud Assist is currently in public preview and accessible for every Google Cloud user to try.

Design applications

Gemini Cloud Assist is integrated with Application Design Center to accelerate application infrastructure design and deployment. Using Gemini Cloud Assist, you can design your application infrastructure by describing your desired outcomes in natural language. For example, you can ask Gemini Cloud Assist to “design a three-tier e-commerce website,” or “design a mobile app which converts photos to videos,” and it automatically generates architecture diagrams and application templates, which you can iteratively refine with Gemini. With the deployment workflow directly built into the Application Design Center, you can also instantly deploy these application templates onto Google Cloud. In addition, you can distribute these templates to your team using privately shared catalogs, or export them as Terraform for broader interoperability with other workflows.

Troubleshoot with Investigations

Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations is a new AI-powered workflow that significantly accelerates troubleshooting and issue resolution. It leverages your cloud environment and a comprehensive set of data such as log and error patterns, configuration changes, and troubleshooting runbooks, to quickly identify root causes and provide mitigation options. 

The Investigations flow includes errors seen, affected resources, and user-provided symptoms that lead to observations and summarized findings generated by Gemini Cloud Assist. You can launch Investigations directly from errors and log entries, or via the Investigations icon at the top-right corner of every console page. Then, you can ask questions in chat related to a given investigation and iterate through revisions. In addition, Gemini Cloud Assist facilitates an easy handoff of Investigations cases to Google Support, who, with your consent, can leverage the findings to provide continued human assistance. Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations is currently in private preview. To try it, sign up here.

Optimize cost and utilization

Gemini Cloud Assist also provides AI-driven cost management and optimization capabilities for developer and DevOps teams, as well as for FinOps practitioners and finance teams. In the Cloud Hub Cost Optimization dashboard, developers and DevOps teams get insights into application cost and utilization. By linking costs with utilization data like vCPU or memory, Gemini identifies inefficiencies and delivers personalized recommendations. For more granular cost and utilization analysis, Cost Explorer provides flexible heatmap visualizations and aggregates compute and memory utilization across single or multiple resources. It supports 30 days of historical data and is fully filterable by project, application, Google Cloud product, and resource type.

Within Cloud Billing, we have already seen over 100,000 FinOps hours saved by our customers using Gemini Cloud Assist cost reports over the past year (Jan 24-Jan 25). We are now extending Gemini Cloud Assist to include waste insights and cost optimization opportunities with FinOps Hub 2.0.

Gemini Cloud Assist integrations across Google Cloud 

We’re providing AI-powered assistance directly within your existing workflows by integrating Gemini Cloud Assist across your favorite Google Cloud services, including Storage Insights, Cloud Observability, Firebase, Database Center, Flow Analyzer, FinOps Hub, as well as our security- and compliance-related services.

This also includes an improved chat experience. Gemini Cloud Assist is now able to provide even better quality assistance with richer context about your deployments, including your assets and their configurations, system health, metrics and logs, and cost reporting, as well as addressing specialized domain-specific tasks such as BigQuery code generation, and database and storage explanation.

Build and manage your applications with Google Cloud today

Our new application-centric cloud powered by AI makes it easier to build and manage the applications that fuel the future of your organization.

To help get you going you can try out the new Enterprise tier of the Google Developer Program in limited preview. This new offer provides developer and platform teams a safe and affordable way to explore Google Cloud and its AI products. For a set monthly cost of $75/month per seat, developers get access to a sandbox environment where they can experiment with new technologies, build proof of concepts, and improve their skills. It includes Gemini Code Assist Enterprise, discounts on cloud resources, and integrations with Gitlab, Harness, Jetbrains, and Snyk, so developers can take advantage of reference architectures to build common gen AI application patterns. You can learn more about this offer here.

And to try the new products and features announced in this blog: 

• Log into your Google Cloud console today to experience the power of Gemini Cloud Assist. Press “Opt(Alt)+G” or click the Gemini button to launch Gemini Cloud Assist in the console. To learn more details about the features, visit the website here.

• Log into Cloud Hub in Google Cloud console today to get full visibility of your application landscape. To try the Cost Optimization dashboard of Cloud Hub, sign up here.

• Sign up for the Gemini Code Assist agents preview waitlist.

• Sign up to try Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations.

• Install the Gemini Code Assist for individuals extension in your IDE of choice to use Gemini 2.5 for your personal projects.

• Check out Firebase Studio.