An Introduction to AWS Service Catalog

At re:Invent 2014 conference, Amazon unveiled a collection of new products, features, and services to the existing AWS services.

And through this blog, let’s take a look at AWS Service Catalog, by leveraging the features of this service administrators can create and manage approved catalogs of resources that end users can then access via a personalized portal.

Using AWS Service Catalog, users can control their application. It defines which user can access which application. It can benefit an enterprise by its agility and reducing cost. Users can launch only those application which is available in their Catalog.

According to Amazon, AWS Service Catalog will be available from early next year.

Advantages :

Standardization

An IT department can create  customized catalogs containing products that consists standard architectures and configurations. According to business policies a user can only launch applications which is available in his catalog.

Control

IT administrators  can now centrally manage the portfolios of products that users can browse and launch. Also they can control how those products are configured. Control can be at individual level, group level , department level , or cost center level . Administrator has the access to update the application so that users can only launch the most up-to-date versions of the products.

Self-Service

It has the property of self service which means end users with a personalized portal can use to find and launch products on a self-service basis. If you have defined some constraints then Users can customize products within these constraints only. Users are notified, once a product has been launched . When new product updates are available and you can choose to update the products when they launched, and also we can delete them if they are no longer required.

Integrate with your existing systems

Integration is also possible. You can integrate your organization portal with AWS Service catalog. Hence a single centralized portal can benefit an organization.

It is  full-fledged AWS service. It has two distinct user interfaces.

1. For Administrator
2. For Users

For integration and product management, It provides set of API. Let’s start them one by one.

Service Catalog

In a single AWS account, you can have a service Catalog. Administrator manages it, and Service catalog contains one or more Portfolios.

Administrator

For uploading and maintaining Portfolios of products in a Service Catalog, Administrator is responsible.

User

By browsing a portal containing one or more Portfolios, a User interacts with a Service Catalog. User can locate a product of interest, and can launch it. The user has an option to  run within the same AWS account as the Administrator or it can run in a different one.

Portal

In Service Catalog a Portal is a view, which is customized to reflect the Portfolios and Products. A portal is accessible to a particular User only.

Portfolio

If a product has multiple versions then it is a good idea that we can put them in a Portfolio.  We can grant portfolio to a certain set of Users which is determined by IAM role, group, or user name in that Portal.

Product

A collection of AWS resources like EC2 , application servers, RDS , and so on that are instantiated and managed as a stack. We can assume that a cloud formation template will deploy a Product . Hence within a single Portfolio a multiple version of Products can exists.

e.g. An application for a small organization can have medium EC2 instances whereas for a large organization , we can have large instances.

Stay Tuned

All the services discussed are yet to be launched, please feel free to register here for more notifications and updates on AWS

References : http://aws.amazon.com/servicecatalog/