Instructor: Now let's talk a service
that can come up at the exam on one or two questions,
which is the AWS Service Catalog.
So the idea is that when you go and start with AWS,
you have too many options,
and it's very complicated for beginners to get started,
and sometimes your users just want to be using the services,
and so they may create stacks,
though they are not going to be compliant,
or in line with the rest of your organization.
So they just want a quick, self-service portal,
that allows them to be launching
a set of authorized products,
that will be predefined by admins in the Service Catalog.
So for example, you may have a user that say, hey,
I want a virtual machine for doing my machine learning.
I want a database for my application,
I want storage options, etc, etc.
So this is where the Service Catalog comes in.
So the idea is that you have admins and users.
So your admins are going to create products,
and products are a short name for CloudFormation templates.
So we already know CloudFormation templates,
the idea is that we'll use products to encapsulate them.
Then we build a portfolio,
which is a collection of products, okay,
a collection of CloudFormation templates.
And then we define controls such as IAM Permissions,
for who can access this portfolio.
Now your users on the other side,
they will have a product list available to them,
and they will see that list,
thanks to the IAM Permissions we have defined from before.
And if they're happy with the product, they will launch it,
and then the product will be provisioned,
which is ready to use, properly configured,
and properly typed.
So the idea is that here,
we allow our users to pick and choose
from a list of CloudFormation templates,
organizing portfolios, and launch them safely.
So our users may not have access to AWS at all,
but only to the Service Catalog,
and they can launch full stacks, okay,
without directly accessing CloudFormation,
only by using the CloudFormation templates
authorized in the Service Catalog.
But this allows them to be faster,
and launch exactly what they can.
Okay, so now let's talk about sharing catalogs,
so you have a catalog in your account, okay?
And you can share it with other accounts,
or within an organization.
So let's say there's a portfolio,
you have two sharing options.
The first one is to share a reference to the portfolio,
and then import the shared portfolio
in the recipient accounts.
And in that case, that will be synchronized
with the original portfolio.
So that means that the admin in account B,
can import the full portfolio,
and launch products out of the portfolio.
And then in case we add more products to the portfolio
in account A, then the admins will see them,
because they're in sync.
And so will be able to launch products from them as well.
But we can also deploy a copy of the portfolio
into the recipient accounts,
in which case, well, in case of updates happening
in portfolio A, they need as well to be copied
into the account B.
Because this is a copy, and not an in-sync sharing.
So two options in different use cases.
And then based on this,
you can create products from the imported portfolio,
to your local portfolios.
Okay, finally, let's talk about tags with Service Catalog.
So you can manage tags on your provision products,
and this is called a TagOption.
So this is a key value pair you predefine
in the Service Catalog, and it's managed by it.
And this is used to create a tag in AWS,
so you can associate a TagOption
with a portfolio and a product.
For example, we can associate the TagOption environment
with the key and value prod, okay.
We associate it with portfolio A,
and that means at any time we launch a stack
from a product in portfolio A,
then it will inherit the tags, key environment
and value prod, and as you can see, for example,
my EC2 instances now are tagged properly.
So the use cases of that is to do proper resource tagging,
or to only use allowed tags
that are defined in the Service Catalog.
And these TagOptions can also be shared
with other accounts, or with an organization.
So that's it for the Service Catalog, I hope you liked it,
And I will see you in the next lecture.