What is AppRegistry?

With AppRegistry, you can store your AWS applications, the collection of resources that are associated with your applications, and application attribute groups. Application attribute groups define the context of your applications and resources. The following sections describe the benefits that AppRegistry provides.

Create and manage application metadata in one location

AppRegistry enables application search, reporting, and management actions from a central location. Builders seldom create applications in a single AWS account. They typically separate application resources by lifecycle phases such as development, test, and production.

AppRegistry allows you to group and view all your resource collections across the AWS accounts that you define.

Share applications and attribute groups with AWS organization principals

You can share applications and attribute groups to any principal in your AWS organization. A principal can be the entire organization, organization unit (OU), or an account in the organization. When you share to a parent OU, you automatically share to all accounts and child OUs in that parent OU.

AppRegistry uses AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) to share applications and attribute groups.

Associate resources with applications

You can associate AWS CloudFormation stacks and AWS Service Catalog provisioned products to your application. The provisioned products and stacks associated with your application represent the AWS resources for the application.

In the console, you can choose a provisioned product, an AWS CloudFormation stack, or enter the ARN of the AWS CloudFormation stack you want to associate with your application.

You can only associate an AWS CloudFormation stack or a provisioned product with one application. You can add or remove resources from your application at any time.

Integrate AppRegistry with other AWS services

The following AWS services integrate with AppRegistry applications.

• AWS Systems Manager

  AppRegistry works with a capability of Systems Manager that's called Application Manager. You can investigate and remediate issues with AWS resources in the context of their applications and clusters. For more information, see AWS Systems Manager Application Manager in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide.

• AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM)

  Enables you to share AWS Service Catalog applications and attribute groups in AWS Organizations and syncs those shares with any changes in your AWS Organizations structure. For more information, see AWS Resource Access Manager.

• AWS Resource Groups

  Organizes your AWS resources into groups with criteria you define as tags. A resource group is a collection of resources that match the resource types specified in a query, and share one or more tags or portions of tags. For more information, see AWS services that work with AWS Resource Groups.

• AWS Resilience Hub

  Allows you to choose the AppRegistry applications that contain the resources you want to use in the application that you're describing in AWS Resilience Hub. You can add only one AppRegistry application at a time. For more information, see Discover the structure and describe your Resilience Hub application.

• AWS Service Management Connectors

  Enables you to view your registered applications on AppRegistry in your ServiceNow CMDB to leverage the AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow. Organizations create, migrate, and manage applications on AWS that are associated with multiple AWS resources. For more information, see AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow.

• AWS Well-Architected Tool

  Allows you to enter the application ARN of a AppRegistry application that you want to associate with a workload. AWS Solutions Architects developed the AWS WA Tool Framework best practices based on their years of experience building solutions across a wide variety of businesses. The Framework provides a consistent approach for measuring architectures and guidance for implementing designs that scale with your needs over time. For more information, see AWS Well-Architected Tool.

Assign application metadata

AppRegistry allows you to assign metadata to your application with an attribute group. Teams such as finance, security, and central IT can create and manage attributes that capture important application metadata. Application attributes support an open JSON schema that provides the flexibility you need to capture the complexity of your organization’s metadata taxonomy. Application attributes might include items such as the application security classification, organizational ownership, application type, cost center, and support information. You can see updates to attributes immediately reflected in all associated applications.

Provide application tagging

AppRegistry provides you with an API action that's called SyncResource. The API syncs the following three resource system tags that are associated with an application.

AppRegistry provides a API action that tags the AWS CloudFormation stacks associated with an application with three application system tags. The three system tags contain the application ID, application name, and application ARN. When you call the API, we initiate an AWS CloudFormation Update Stack action that applies the tags to the stack, as well as the stack resources.

The following topic describes the key concepts you need to know to use AppRegistry for centralized application reporting, management, and governance.

Pricing

For information about AppRegistry pricing, see AWS Service Catalog pricing.