What is the role of a cloud services catalog?

A cloud services catalog satisfies the self-service aspect of cloud computing. It does this by listing all of the available virtual machines (VMs) that can be created in the cloud environment, such as web servers, application servers, databases, and so on. The cloud services catalog does not define the capabilities for the cloud, since the capabilities could be much more expansive than the cloud services catalog. The cloud services catalog does not define the available VMs currently running in the cloud. The cloud services catalog also does not define the drivers for VMs in the cloud; this would be the agent or services file required for VMs running in the cloud.