Icon source: AWS
AWS Service Catalog
Cloud Provider: AWS
What is AWS Service Catalog
AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS, enabling users to easily find and deploy the cloud resources they need.
AWS Service Catalog is a robust service designed by Amazon Web Services to enable organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. This service allows administrators to standardize product offerings, infrastructure, applications, and services while ensuring compliance with organizational policies and security standards. AWS Service Catalog is particularly useful for large enterprises and institutions that need to manage a wide range of resources across different departments and for various projects effectively.
At its core, AWS Service Catalog allows IT administrators to curate a catalog of pre-defined products, which could include anything from virtual machine images, servers, software, or complete multi-tier application architectures. Each product in the catalog is a versioned template that describes the necessary AWS resources and their configurations. These templates are typically defined using AWS CloudFormation, which is a service that enables modeling and setting up AWS resources efficiently with simple, declarative text files. Once these products are defined in the AWS Service Catalog, users or groups within the organization can then access and deploy these products based on their permissions. This model significantly simplifies the process for end-users to obtain and launch the IT resources they need while ensuring that they comply with the organization's governance and security policies. For instance, an IT department can enforce that all databases must be encrypted or that all web servers must be placed behind a firewall without needing to directly manage each instance of these resources.
The AWS Service Catalog also improves the agility of IT service deployment within organizations. By using standardized products from the catalog, teams can quickly deploy their environments without waiting for prolonged procurement and compliance checks, as these products have been pre-approved and comply with the organization's policies.
Furthermore, it offers version control, allowing administrators to update products in the catalog and users to easily upgrade to the latest version of their deployed services. In addition to operational efficiency, the AWS Service Catalog also provides mechanisms for cost control and optimization. By standardizing the resources that can be provisioned, organizations can better predict and manage costs. Administrators can track usage, enforce budget limits, and analyze spending patterns for the different products deployed by various departments.
Overall, the AWS Service Catalog is an essential service for any organization looking to enforce governance, enhance operational efficiencies, and manage costs while leveraging the extensive capabilities of AWS. Through its powerful management console, API, and integrations with other AWS services, it offers a streamlined path for managing a wide array of IT resources in a secure, efficient, and compliant manner.
Key AWS Service Catalog Features
AWS Service Catalog provides centralized management of IT services with features for standardization, governance, self-service provisioning, version control, cost management, and integration capabilities.
Allows organizations to create and manage a centralized catalog of IT services that are approved for use on AWS, ensuring compliance and governance.
Enables administrators to enforce standards and governance over the IT services deployed in AWS, reducing the risk of non-compliance.
Empowers users to quickly deploy approved IT services, improving efficiency and agility by reducing the time and complexity involved in obtaining and configuring resources.
Supports versioning of products in the catalog, allowing for easy updates and management of different versions, including the ability to roll back to previous versions if necessary.
Provides mechanisms for tracking and controlling AWS resource costs by limiting which services can be provisioned and enabling budget tracking for those services.
Offers integration with other AWS services and supports customization through CloudFormation templates, allowing for the deployment of a wide range of applications and services.
AWS Service Catalog Use Cases
AWS Service Catalog is utilized for streamlining IT service management, facilitating DevOps automation, enhancing governance and compliance, and customizing deployments for diverse team requirements.
AWS Service Catalog enables organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. This streamlines the deployment of resources and helps IT administrators control which products are used, ensuring compliance with company policies and reducing shadow IT.
By integrating with AWS Service Catalog, DevOps teams can automate the deployment of applications and infrastructure. This use case involves pre-defining cloud resources and configurations, which can be programmatically deployed, enabling faster and more reliable delivery pipelines.
AWS Service Catalog supports governance and compliance by allowing organizations to enforce infrastructure and application configurations according to regulatory and corporate guidelines. It tracks who has deployed what and where, simplifying audit processes and compliance reporting.
Organizations can leverage AWS Service Catalog to create customized portfolios for different teams or projects, ensuring that each team has access to the resources and configurations they need. This is particularly useful in large organizations where teams may have varying requirements.
Services AWS Service Catalog integrates with
AWS Service Catalog integrates with AWS CloudFormation to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, allowing you to provision and manage them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
AWS Service Catalog integrates with AWS CloudTrail to log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure.
AWS Service Catalog integrates with Amazon CloudWatch to track and log performance metrics and operational health of AWS resources.
AWS Service Catalog integrates with AWS Config to track configurations of AWS resources and notify when configurations change.
AWS Service Catalog integrates with AWS Organizations to manage and control access to AWS resources across multiple AWS accounts.
AWS Service Catalog integrates with AWS IAM to control who can access your Service Catalog and what actions they can perform within it.
AWS Service Catalog pricing models
AWS Service Catalog pricing is based on the pay-as-you-go model for the AWS resources you provision without any additional fees for using the Service Catalog itself.