Promote Software Standardization, Compliance, and Cost Management with AWS Service Catalog

We understand how important it is for you to be able to simplify your software provisioning on AWS, while at the same time promoting compliance and cost management throughout your customers’ organizations. In an effort to help you manage your software on AWS, we’re excited to announce the general availability of AWS Service Catalog, a service that allows you to create and manage approved catalogs of products that your customers can access via a personalized portal.

What is AWS Service Catalog?
AWS Service Catalog is a custom portal for users to manage software. With Service Catalog, you maintain fine-grained access control to AWS resources and applications, while controlling cost and maintaining compliance across the organization for your customers.

In using Service Catalog, you have the ability to:

• Create customized catalogs containing products that incorporate standard architectures and configurations, to ensure that products launched by end users conform to your business policies
• Centrally manage the portfolio of products that users can browse and launch
• Control how products within your portfolios are configured
• Employ fine-grained access control by individual, group, department, or cost center
• Make updates to products so that users have access to the most up-to-date versions
• Subscribe to AWS Marketplace products, package the products into an AWS CloudFormation template, and provide the products to your customers
• Personalize a portal for end users that they can use to find and launch products on a self-service basis

How Do You Use AWS Service Catalog?

Traditionally, IT administrators use documents to define products and publish their catalog in spreadsheets, where users need to take log tickets to provision resources. The provisioning may be done using scripts and manual steps while the requestor waits. AWS Service Catalog integrates with other AWS services that allow you to manage the IT Product lifecycle. You can define products using CloudFormation, publish those products in Service Catalog, and allow end-users to provision resources in a self-service manner. The deployed infrastructure can be monitored using AWS CloudWatch and any configuration changes are tracked AWS Config. Additionally, changes made to the deployed infrastructure resources are tracked by Config. AWS CloudTrail can be used to capture an audit trail of all operations.

As an APN Partner, Why Should I Care about Service Catalog?

Customers engage APN Partners to provide AWS services to their entire business to gain efficiencies across departments and business functions.  Often times, this means that Managed Service Partners are tasked with managing dozens of accounts across a single business to ensure the right levels of access, control, flexibility, and tracking.  The AWS Service Catalog provides APN Partners with a way to provide visibility and self-service management of a pre-defined portfolio of offerings to each department, while still maintaining corporate-level compliance.

As Managed Service Partners increase their customer base and the number of accounts grow, the AWS Service Catalog provides a way to minimize complexity by provisioning resources that are tagged and configured correctly. You can reduce operational workload by enabling customers to browse and launch your products in a self-service manner and automate all the monitoring and tracking of their usage. This gives you complete visibility of the resources provisioned and reduces the possibility of operational live-site incidents caused by misconfigured resources.  Tagging resources based on the portfolio or product gives you the opportunity to cross-charge specific departments or projects.

How Can I Get Started?

To sign up for Service Catalog, visit https://thinkwithwp.com/servicecatalog.