Amazon Web Services launches Service Catalog to give admins more control over usage

Amazon Web Services today introduced a cloud service called AWS Service Catalog, which can retain key building blocks for developers across companies to use in their application development.

Announced at Amazon’s re:Invent user conference in Las Vegas, AWS Service Catalog will also give more control to chief information officers concerned with how they are using Amazon’s cloud.

The new feature could further distinguish Amazon from its many competitors, including fast-growing public clouds from Google and Microsoft.

And it shows how much Amazon cares about running a wide variety of company workloads from armies of developers, not just a few here and there. That means compliance is becoming more important, too.

“This will allow enterprise admins to create portfolios of products set up in the Config [a separate new service] and in the way that they want them deployed, and then they can make them easily discoverable for employees … on a portal that they host,” Amazon Web Services senior vice president Andy Jassy said.

Here’s how Amazon summarizes the new service in a statement:

AWS Service Catalog will enable administrators to create and share catalogs of customized “products” that incorporate company-approved standard architectures and configurations. Administrators can employ access controls by individual, group, department, or cost center, giving them fine-grained control over who is allowed to use a given application. With AWS Service Catalog, administrators can set policies to help them meet their requirements, such as limiting how many times an application can be used in order to maintain licensing compliance.

The service will integrate with Amazon’s CloudTrail service, which tracks all Amazon cloud application programming interfaces (API) calls. It will become available early next year.