AWS Service Catalog
AWS Service Catalog is a service on Amazon Web Services that lets organizations create and manage catalogs of approved IT services and products for use on AWS. It governs deployments through curated AWS CloudFormation infrastructure-as-code templates, letting a company limit which employees can access a portfolio of predefined, pre-approved AWS resources. This keeps self-service deployment consistent with organizational standards while still giving teams the templates they need to provision resources quickly.
Key points
- Lets administrators define a portfolio of approved IT services and products that end users are permitted to deploy.
- Manages deployed IT services and governs them using AWS CloudFormation infrastructure-as-code templates.
- Restricts employee access to only the predefined portfolio of AWS resources they are approved to use.
- Helps enforce consistency, compliance, and cost control across self-service deployments in an organization.
- Distinct from AWS Control Tower: Control Tower governs account-level setup and landing-zone guardrails, while Service Catalog governs what individual users can self-service deploy within an account, without needing broad IAM permissions to the underlying services.
- Extensibility and version control — a product can be added to any number of portfolios without duplicating it; updating a product to a new version propagates that update to every portfolio referencing it.