Managing infrastructure provisioning should be as simple as selecting from a catalog while remaining as powerful as custom code. Plural’s Service Catalog provides a self-service platform for developers while ensuring compliance, security, and best practices set by platform teams.

Unlike ad hoc infrastructure requests, the Service Catalog enables templated, PR-driven workflows, allowing developers to deploy Kubernetes resources, databases, or cloud services without manual intervention. This approach ensures consistency, governance, and automation across environments while eliminating bottlenecks.

Comparison with Backstage

Plural's Service Catalog and Backstage's Software Catalog both aim to streamline software management through self-service workflows, but they focus on different aspects of the development lifecycle.

Backstage's Software Catalog provides a comprehensive view of an organization's software ecosystem. It uses YAML-based metadata files to track ownership and relationships between various components, such as services, libraries, and data pipelines.

By contrast, Plural's Service Catalog specializes in infrastructure provisioning and compliance. Built on Kubernetes custom resources (CRDs), it extends the concept of template-driven workflows beyond application scaffolding to include infrastructure deployment. This approach allows platform teams to define standardized provisioning paths for cloud resources, Kubernetes clusters, and security tooling, ensuring all deployments adhere to organizational policies.

Resource Provisioning Flexibility

Plural Service Catalog supports various infrastructure components, integrating seamlessly with Plural Stacks and Plural CD. Developers can provision:

• Kubernetes resources such as clusters, namespaces, and networking policies.

• Cloud infrastructure, including databases, S3 buckets, and load balancers.

• Observability, security, and data tooling like Prometheus, OPA Gatekeeper, and MLFlow.

Conclusion

Plural’s Service Catalog bridges the gap between flexible, self-service provisioning and enterprise-grade governance. Standardizing deployments through templated, PR-driven workflows empowers developers to spin up Kubernetes resources, databases, and cloud services quickly—without compromising security, compliance, or best practices. As a result, organizations gain a streamlined, consistent environment that retains operational guardrails while fostering rapid innovation. With automation integrated at every step, Plural’s Service Catalog removes bottlenecks and ensures every deployment meets the highest reliability and security standards.