AWS Service Catalog Specialized2015年〜
A catalog service for delivering approved IT services across your organization via self-service
What It Does
AWS Service Catalog lets organizations create and manage a catalog of approved IT services, enabling end users to provision resources via self-service. Administrators define products based on CloudFormation templates or Terraform configurations, group them into portfolios, and publish them to specific users or teams. End users simply select a product from the catalog, and pre-approved resources are automatically provisioned.
Use Cases
Providing standardized development environments to dev teams, self-service deployment of analytics platforms for data science teams, automating initial environment setup for new hires, distributing compliance-ready infrastructure templates, standardizing common resources across multi-account environments, and resource provisioning with per-department cost controls.
Everyday Analogy
Think of an internal office supply catalog. If employees could freely choose any computer or equipment, management becomes chaotic. By selecting from an approved catalog and submitting a request, they're guaranteed to receive products that meet company standards. Service Catalog works the same way - IT publishes only approved resource configurations as a catalog, maintaining governance while enabling self-service.
What Is Service Catalog?
AWS Service Catalog bridges IT governance and self-service provisioning. In large organizations, letting developers freely create resources risks non-compliant configurations. But requiring IT approval for every resource slows development. Service Catalog solves this by publishing safe configuration templates as a catalog, balancing developer autonomy with organizational governance.
Managing Products and Portfolios
The core concepts in Service Catalog are Products and Portfolios. Products are defined from CloudFormation templates or Terraform configurations and support version control. Portfolios group multiple products and grant access to IAM users, groups, or roles. For example, a data analytics team portfolio might include Redshift clusters, Glue jobs, and S3 buckets, while a development team portfolio includes EC2 instances, RDS databases, and Lambda functions. For comprehensive best practices on managing products and portfolios, technical books on Amazon are recommended.
Constraints and Tag Management
Service Catalog lets you set constraints on product provisioning. Launch constraints allow resources to be created with a specified role regardless of the end user's IAM permissions. Template constraints restrict parameter choices - for example, limiting instance types to specific sizes. The TagOption feature automatically applies organization-standard tags to all provisioned resources, ensuring consistent cost allocation and management.
Things to Watch Out For
- Product version updates are not automatically applied to already-provisioned products - plan user notifications and migration strategies in advance
- Set portfolio sharing scope appropriately and apply constraints to prevent unintended users from provisioning high-cost resources
