A look at the new Google Cloud Marketplace Private Catalog, now with Terraform support

Editor's note: As of March 2022, Private Catalog is now called Service Catalog. This change did not affect any of the great functionality mentioned below: it continues to be built-in Google Cloud functionality that helps you efficiently manage and distribute approved solution configurations across your organization.

In April 2019, we announced that Private Catalog was generally available to all Google Cloud Marketplace customers, giving cloud administrators, developers, and procurement managers within an organization a single, centralized home for apps and solutions that are approved for everyone’s internal use. Private Catalog makes teams more productive by making Google Cloud services, third-party and internal solutions easier to find and use, and limits risk by letting admins grant clear visibility and deployment controls. 

Since making Private Catalog generally available, we’ve been working closely with multiple Enterprise customers and are pleased to announce enhancements to our admin experience, along with support for Terraform.

Deploy your infrastructure using Terraform

Engineers increasingly use Terraform as their preferred  technology for  building and deploying solutions that can scale across clouds, and Terraform support has been one of our most oft-requested features.

With this update to Private Catalog, you can ingest and deploy Terraform configurations. Further, you can deploy your infrastructure using Terraform without having to install Terraform. Stay tuned for additional features this year to enhance the Terraform experience.

Easier-to-manage products 

With Private Catalog, the products you create traditionally must live under a single catalog. This made it easy to manage your products at the catalog level but made it difficult if you wanted to include the same product in multiple catalogs, or get a list of all the products in your organization.

With the latest version of Private Catalog, products and catalogs are now separate; you can now manage products outside of a catalog, bulk-add products to multiple catalogs, and gain a clear, concise view of all the products in their organizations, along with which catalogs they’re shared to. Private Catalog also features a revamped Admin UX that makes it easy to view lists of products and catalogs.

Simple delegate management

Before the current update, you had to add Private Catalog IAM permissions at the Organization level. We heard feedback that you wanted the flexibility to add permissions at different levels of the GCP resource hierarchy. Now, you can now add Catalog IAM permissions at the folder and project levels, which eliminates the need for a Cloud Admin at the Org level to manage Catalog Admin permissions. With this federated model,  complex enterprises can easily manage separate catalogs and permissions anywhere in the GCP hierarchy and enable admins to manage individual catalogs at different folders or projects. No more losing track of who’s an Org Admin, and restricting Catalog Admins’ permissions. Of course, you can also choose to maintain the existing centralized model if you choose.

View shared catalogs with ease

Another  customer pain point has been around catalog sharing. Cloud admins share catalogs with the GCP Org, Folder or Project to provide visibility of the solutions to their end users, but Private Catalog didn’t show the sharing metadata. With this release, sharing controls and information are displayed prominently in the Catalog list, with improved governance controls, and you can easily unshare the catalog.

Bulk-edit products 

When you shared products across many catalogs, you’ve traditionally had to recreate them in each catalog and manage each catalog separately. With this release, products are managed independently from catalogs, so you can easily bulk-assign them to catalogs and manage the product in a single place.

Begin your move to Private Catalog today

This is our largest update to Private Catalogs since its launch in April. To take advantage of the many new capabilities, you will need to migrate to it, which will move your products into a single Google Cloud project. 

We’re working hard to make the migration process painless and simple. For existing Private Catalog customers, when you’re ready to migrate, please fill out this short, six-question form. We will then contact you directly to schedule your migration and get you up and running on the newest version. New customers can visit the Private Catalog page to sign up or learn more about the feature here. Please note that all new Private Catalog customers will need to select a project when you first start up.

We hope the new functionality will help you ensure compliance and governance within your organization, and we welcome any feedback you may have. Try out Private Catalog on Google Cloud Marketplace today.