Service Catalog & Provisioning

The Service Catalog gives engineering and operations teams a governed self-service portal for cloud resources. Instead of granting developers direct access to cloud consoles, you define approved resources (compute, storage, databases, networking) with pre-set guardrails, and teams request them through BlueWhale Stack.

This eliminates console sprawl, enforces tagging and sizing policies, and gives your cloud platform team a complete audit trail of every provisioned resource — without being a bottleneck.

AWS provisioning is generally available (GA). The following resource types can be provisioned directly from the catalog:

• EC2 — virtual machines (instance type, AMI, VPC, subnet, security groups, key pair)
• S3 — storage buckets (region, access control, versioning, encryption, lifecycle policy)
• RDS — managed databases (engine, version, instance class, storage, multi-AZ, parameter group)
• VPC — virtual private clouds (CIDR, subnets, route tables, internet gateway, NAT gateway)
• EFS — managed NFS file systems (throughput mode, lifecycle, encryption, access points)

1. 1

   Open the catalog

   Navigate to Service Catalog in the left menu. Browse resource types by category or search by name.

2. 2

   Select a resource type

   Click the resource type you need (e.g., EC2 Instance). The request form opens with a description, available options, and any platform-wide guardrails visible.

3. 3

   Ask Whale AI for sizing advice

   Describe your workload in the Whale AI sidebar: “A Node.js API with 50 concurrent users and peak 200 rpm.” Whale AI Spark will recommend an instance type and justify the recommendation with observed workload patterns.

4. 4

   Complete the form

   Fill in required fields: name, environment (dev/staging/prod), region, and resource-type-specific options. Tag fields marked Required must be completed — these enforce your organisation's tagging policy.

5. 5

   Submit for approval (if required)

   Requests for production resources or above a defined cost threshold go to an approval queue. Approvers are notified by email and can approve or reject from the notification link or the BlueWhale Stack Approvals dashboard.

6. 6

   Track provisioning

   Once approved (or immediately for auto-approved requests), provisioning begins. The request shows a live status — Queued → Provisioning → Complete. The resource appears in Inventory as soon as it is live.

Approval rules are configured in Settings → Service Catalog → Approval policies. Rules can require approval based on resource type, environment, estimated monthly cost, or a combination.

• Auto-approved — provisioning starts immediately; no approval step
• Manager approval — the requestor's manager (as mapped in your IdP) must approve
• Team approval — any member of a specified team can approve
• Multi-level — requires approval from two separate approvers (e.g., team lead + FinOps)

Platform-level guardrails prevent catalog items from being misconfigured at provisioning time, regardless of what the requestor enters.

• Mandatory tags — any resource missing required tags is rejected before provisioning starts
• Instance size limits — prevent t3.nano being used in production, or p4d.24xlarge outside ML environments
• Region restrictions — limit provisioning to regions your organisation has approved
• Encryption enforcement — block S3 buckets or RDS instances without encryption at rest
• Budget guardrails — prevent a team from exceeding their monthly cloud budget via the catalog