A managed service that lets organizations create and distribute curated portfolios of approved cloud resources, applications, and configurations that users can deploy through a self-service portal. Like a company's internal app store with pre-approved items, service catalogs ensure teams can quickly provision resources that meet organizational standards for security, compliance, and cost. AWS Service Catalog lets admins define CloudFormation-based products, Azure offers Managed Applications for marketplace distribution, GCP provides Service Catalog for organizing cloud resources, and OCI has its own service marketplace for standardized deployments.
An enterprise IT team creates a service catalog containing pre-approved database configurations, web application stacks, and development environments. When a new project team needs infrastructure, they browse the catalog and deploy a compliant three-tier application stack with one click — complete with proper network isolation, encryption, logging, and cost tags — instead of waiting weeks for manual provisioning and security review.
These services all help organizations offer approved cloud resources through a controlled, reusable experience, but they are not identical. AWS Service Catalog is the closest match, letting admins publish portfolios of approved products, often backed by CloudFormation. Azure Managed Applications is more focused on packaging and governing deployable solutions, especially for internal or marketplace distribution. Google Cloud Service Catalog has been used to organize and deploy approved solutions in Google Cloud environments. OCI Marketplace provides curated deployable images and stacks, but it is more marketplace-oriented than a full enterprise service catalog in the AWS sense.