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.