A service of AWS that fails to get a ton of attention is Service Catalog. This service seeks to enable organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS. It permits organizations to centrally manage their commonly deployed IT services and can help maintain appropriate governance and compliance.

The idea is your end users (IT staff) can quickly deploy the IT services they need that you have approved and that they will do so following the constraints that you have set.

Benefits include:

• Standardization – you can place restrictions on the types and configurations of AWS resources launched
• Self-service discovery and launch – permit users to browse listings of services and applications available to them, and to launch them as provisioned products
• Fine-grained access control – IAM users and groups form the basis of permissions for the resources listed in the catalogs
• Extensibility and version control – products can be added to various portfolios from a single copy, and versioning updates all copies

AWS Service Catalog terminology:

• Products – an IT service that you want to make available for deployment on AWS. It can consist of AWS resources such as EC2 instances, storage volumes, databases, monitoring configurations, and networking components. You create products through the import of CloudFormation templates.
• Portfolios – a collection of products along with configuration information.
• Versioning – Service Catalog allows you to manage multiple versions of products in your catalog.
• Constraints – Template and Launch constraints allow you to carefully control deployments.
• Stack – as mentioned above, the building block for the Products are CloudFormation stacks.