AWS Service Catalog
💡 Definition
AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. This helps organizations achieve consistent governance and meet compliance requirements, while enabling users to quickly deploy only the approved IT services they need.
🔑 Key Concepts
- Product: An IT service that you want to make available (e.g., an EC2 instance pre-configured with specific software, an RDS database).
- Portfolio: A collection of products.
- Users: End-users (developers, data scientists) can browse and launch products from portfolios they have access to.
- Admin: IT administrators create and manage products and portfolios.
- Governance: Ensures that deployed resources adhere to organizational standards and best practices (e.g., using specific instance types, encryption).
⚙️ How it Works
Admins define products (often using CloudFormation templates). They organize these into portfolios and grant access to specific users or groups. Users then browse the catalog and launch approved products, without needing direct AWS console access to provision raw resources.
🎯 Use Cases
- Standardization: Ensuring that only approved and properly configured resources are deployed.
- Self-Service: Empowering users to provision their own resources without requiring IT approval for every request.
- Compliance: Maintaining compliance by embedding necessary controls into products.
💰 Pricing Model
- Free: AWS Service Catalog itself is free. You pay only for the AWS resources (e.g., EC2 instances, S3 storage) that users provision through the catalog.
📝 Exam Tips (CLF-C02)
- Key for governance and standardization of IT services.
- Enables self-service provisioning of approved resources.
- Integrates with CloudFormation to define products.
- Used by IT administrators to control what users can deploy.
See Also: * CloudFormation * AWS Organizations * IAM