One of the features a Cloud Management Platform provides, is a self service user interface. Here users can order, manage and retire services. Services are categorized in catalogs, where they can be organized and easily consumed.
By providing a service catalog, users can deploy the services they need quickly and simple. This will improve agility, reduce provisioning time and free up resources in internal IT.
But first some basics. Four items are required to make a service available to users from the CloudForms Self Service Portal:
A Provisioning Dialog which presents the basic configuration options for a virtual machine or instance. A Service Dialog where you allow users to configure virtual machine or instance options. A Service Catalog which is used to group Services Catalog Items together. A Service Catalog Item (the actual Service) which joins a Service Dialog, a Provisioning Dialog and some additional meta data.
We can use role Based Access Control to make certain Service Catalog Items available to specific groups of users.