App Lifecycle Manager regionalization

This document describes how App Lifecycle Manager manages available regions, resource replication, and location requirements for your app offering.

When you offer software as a service (SaaS), distributing and managing your infrastructure across specific Google Cloud regions is essential for meeting customer data residency requirements, minimizing end-user latency, and isolating regional failures. By configuring regionalization settings in App Lifecycle Manager, you establish a single source of truth for where your units can be deployed, automate the replication of offering metadata across geographic locations, and ensure consistent rollout behavior across regions.

Available regions and resource replication

An app offering resource defines where your App Lifecycle Manager units can reside and how your rollouts are managed. When you create an app offering, the regions you select serve as a single source of truth for the supported regions of your app offering. The regions you select are the available regions you've defined for your app offering.

When you use App Lifecycle Manager through Google Cloud console, App Lifecycle Manager automates the replication of the resources you define in your app offering across regions. This ensures consistency and availability of your App Lifecycle Manager resources across all of the available regions you've defined in your app offering.

App Lifecycle Manager replicates the following resources:

  • App offering (Saas)

  • Unit kind (UnitKind)

  • Release (Release)

Using global as a region

Including global as a region within your app offering is generally not recommended for deployment targets. App Lifecycle Manager uses the global region to propagate regional rollouts. Regional rollouts cannot run in the global region.

Rollout regionalization

Supported locations for rollouts are determined by the top-level regions defined in your app offering's available regions.

Rollouts read the list of available regions from the associated app offering.

Resource replication

App Lifecycle Manager handles the creation and updates of resources across all of your app offering's available regions.

When you update your app offering's available regions, App Lifecycle Manager handles the replication:

  • Locations added: Resources are replicated to the newly added locations.

  • Locations with old copies: The content is updated.

Artifact Registry and Developer Connect locations

The locations of your Artifact Registry repository and Developer Connect instance have specific requirements:

  • The region of your Artifact Registry repository and Developer Connect instance can be any valid Google Cloud region. They don't need to be included in your app offering's available regions.

  • The region of your Artifact Registry repository must match the region of your Developer Connect instance.

    This requires the presence of app offering, release, and unit kind resources in all regions defined in your app offering, even though the Artifact Registry repository and Developer Connect instance reside in a single (potentially different) region.

  • Units can only be created in regions specified in your app offering.

App Lifecycle Manager regions configuration example

The following example demonstrates how regionalization works when using App Lifecycle Manager with managed resource replication.

If you want to deploy your app offering in us-central1 and europe-west4, while hosting your Artifact Registry repository and Developer Connect instance in us-east1, your App Lifecycle Manager regional configuration looks like the following:

  • App offering available regions: ['us-central1', 'europe-west4']

  • Artifact Registry repository region: us-east1

  • Developer Connect instance region: us-east1

  • Unit kind and release resources: App Lifecycle Manager manages the creation and updates of these resources across global, us-central1, and europe-west4 regions.

  • Units: Units can be created in either us-central1 or europe-west4.

This configuration lets you manage your deployments across two regions while keeping your artifact management centralized in a third, distinct region with automated resource replication. Consider your latency, compliance, and data residency requirements carefully when selecting your regions.

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