What is Service Catalog?
Service Catalog uses the infrastructure as code (IaC) capabilities of Alibaba Cloud. You can use Service Catalog to create a custom list of IT services and set constraints to meet your organization's governance requirements. This simplifies product selection for businesses that are moving to the cloud and improves the efficiency of IT service delivery.
Prerequisite concepts
Before you read this topic, you should understand the following concept: What is infrastructure as code (IaC)?.
How it works
Service Catalog works as follows:
An administrator creates a product from a Terraform template and adds it to a product portfolio for centralized management.
The administrator grants end users permissions to launch and access the product.
End users query for and launch the product. After the product is launched, a stack is created in the corresponding region of the Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) console. This stack is used to manage the cloud resources that are associated with the product.
End users manage the cloud resources in the Service Catalog console.
Features
Product and product portfolio management for administrators
Administrators can define compliant products using Terraform and manage multiple product versions.
Administrators can create product portfolios, add existing products, and grant end users permissions to access and launch the products.
Administrators can manage all product instances within their accounts. If an end user's role changes, the administrator can take over the management of that user's product instances to prevent business disruptions.
End users can launch products and manage instances.
End users can query the product list and launch products as needed.
End users can query, update, and stop product instances to manage the lifecycle of cloud resources.
Benefits
Secure and compliant resource usage
You can use Terraform to define compliance for the types, specifications, naming conventions, and resource orchestration of 104 Alibaba Cloud services. For more information, see Supported Alibaba Cloud services.
Faster resource delivery
End users can obtain compliant cloud resources by themselves. This accelerates cloud resource delivery.
Simplified lifecycle management
You can use marshaling to query, update, and stop a group of cloud resources as a single unit.
Centralized management
You can centrally configure compliance settings for products. These settings can be shared across multiple enterprise Alibaba Cloud accounts to improve management efficiency.
Scenarios
Administrators customize compliant enterprise products
Administrators can use Service Catalog to customize a product that meets enterprise security and compliance requirements. For example, you can create an Elastic Computing Service (ECS) instance and restrict the instance to specific specifications. This reduces security risks and prevents cost overruns.
End users quickly create cloud infrastructure
A Service Catalog product can be a single server or a website that consists of a database, middleware, and servers. You can grant end users the minimum required permissions to launch and access products. This helps end users quickly find and launch products and reduces the need to switch between different service consoles.
Minimize permissions for enterprise employees
Administrators can grant end users (enterprise employees) permissions to access only specific Service Catalog products. This avoids the management risks that are associated with excessive permissions.