Internal Cloud Service Catalogue

From IT department to internal cloud provider

The cloud transformation fundamentally changes the role of the IT department. Instead of managing systems, platform services are provided. Instead of responding to tickets, products are offered that business units can consume themselves.

This shift requires a service catalogue: the structured overview of all cloud services that IT offers internally — with clear service descriptions, prices, and quality commitments.

Without a service catalogue, sprawl environments emerge where every team goes its own way, IT loses oversight, and costs grow uncontrolled.

What a service catalogue delivers

For business units: A clear overview of what IT can offer, on what terms and at what quality level. No endless back-and-forth about which cloud services are permitted and which are not.

For the IT department: Structured demand rather than ad-hoc requests. Plannable capacity. The basis for cost transparency and internal cost allocation.

For management: Visibility of which services exist, what they cost, and which business units are using them. The basis for well-founded make-or-buy decisions.

Five categories of a cloud service catalogue

1. Platform services — infrastructure as a product

What STACKIT delivers, packaged as an internal offering with clear governance:

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Service	Description	Internal SLA	Pricing model
Compute Standard	Virtual machines, standard tiers	99.5% availability	per vCPU/month
Kubernetes Managed	Managed Kubernetes cluster on STACKIT SKE	99.9% control plane	per node hours
Object Storage	S3-compatible object storage	99.9% durability	per GB/month
Managed Database	PostgreSQL/MySQL managed, daily backups	99.5% availability	per RAM/storage
Private Network	Dedicated VPC with firewalling	Best effort	flat rate per project

2. Security services — security as standard

Security is not ordered — it is part of every project. Nevertheless, there are optional add-ons:

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Service	Description	Target audience
Vulnerability Scanning	Regular container and IaC scans	all production systems
Secrets Management	Central vault for credentials and API keys	all teams with secrets
PAM	Privileged access management for admin access	Tier 1 and Tier 2 systems
Compliance Reporting	Automated evidence for GDPR, TISAX, BAIT	regulated workloads

3. Data services — data as an asset

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Service	Description	SLA
Data Lake Standard	STACKIT Object Storage with partitioning and catalogue	99.5%
Managed Analytics	On-demand analytics environments (Spark, Jupyter)	Best effort
Data Pipeline Standard	Managed ETL infrastructure on STACKIT	99%

4. DevOps services — development platform

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Service	Description	Target audience
CI/CD Platform	Managed pipelines with STACKIT registry and deployment	Development teams
Dev Environments	Standardised development environments on demand	Developers
IaC Templates	Validated Terraform modules for STACKIT resources	all cloud teams

5. Support services — knowledge and help

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Service	Description	Channel
Cloud Onboarding	Introduction for new teams: architecture, billing, IAM	Workshop (2 days)
Architecture Review	Technical assessment of new workload concepts	async review
FinOps Consulting	Cost analysis and optimisation recommendations	Monthly
Incident Support	Escalation path for critical production incidents	Pager/Slack

Internal pricing — three models

Model 1: Cost transparency (showback)

IT shows each business unit what its cloud usage costs — without internal billing. Goal: create cost awareness without administrative burden.

Suitable as a starting point. Behaviour change is slow because there is no direct financial incentive.

Model 2: Internal cost allocation (chargeback)

Costs are actually booked to cost centres. Business units are charged for their cloud usage. The strongest instrument for cost discipline.

Requires clean tagging governance (project tag on every resource), a clear price catalogue, and alignment with finance on billing modalities.

Model 3: Flat budgets with limits

Business units receive a monthly cloud budget. Anyone who exceeds it escalates into an approval process. Resource limits are technically enforced.

A combination of planning certainty for the finance department and autonomy for business units.

SLA — what can be promised internally

A service catalogue without SLAs is a wish list. Internal SLAs must be realistic: they should be slightly below the STACKIT SLAs, to leave buffer for operations, monitoring, and incident response.

Basic rule: Internal availability SLA = STACKIT SLA minus 0.5 percentage points operational buffer.

Response times clearly defined:

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Severity	Definition	Response time	Resolution time
P1 — Critical	Production outage, business-critical	15 minutes	4 hours
P2 — High	Material impairment, workaround possible	1 hour	24 hours
P3 — Medium	Partial impairment, workaround available	4 hours	72 hours
P4 — Low	Cosmetic issue, no production impact	1 business day	next sprint

Building the service catalogue — practical steps

1. Inventory: Which services does IT already deliver, structured or unstructured? What is most frequently requested?

2. Portfolio decision: Which services should be offered in standardised form? What remains project work on request? What is fundamentally declined?

3. Create service descriptions: Per service: name, description, included services, exclusions, pricing model, SLA, onboarding process.

4. Define internal pricing: In alignment with the finance department, based on STACKIT list prices plus internal operating effort.

5. Publish portal or catalogue: STACKIT offers service-account-based access that IT can configure as a self-service portal. Alternatively: a simple Confluence wiki as a starting point.

6. Measure demand and iterate the catalogue: Review quarterly: which services are being used? Which are not? What is missing?