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AWS Service Catalog is designed to manage cloud resources effectively, allowing organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services. By utilizing infrastructure as code templates, AWS Service Catalog enables teams to deploy approved products in a controlled manner while maintaining governance and compliance across the organization.

This service allows IT admins to define and maintain portfolios of standardized resources, which can include EC2 instances, RDS databases, and more, all set up using infrastructure as code. Through defined governance mechanisms, it ensures that only approved resources are deployed and used, enabling organizations to enforce compliance with organizational policies efficiently. The ability to offer these resources through a centralized catalog facilitates the scalability of governance as multiple teams can independently deploy services while adhering to the organizational standards established via the catalog.

Other services, like AWS Config, primarily focus on monitoring the configuration of AWS resources for compliance. AWS CloudTrail provides visibility into user activity by logging API calls, while AWS Control Tower offers a governance solution for managing multi-account AWS environments. However, none serve the specific function of managing and governing infrastructure as code templates as directly and effectively as AWS Service Catalog does.