Sharing and Importing Portfolios

To make your AWS Service Catalog products available to users who are not in your AWS accounts, such as users who belong to other organizations or to other AWS accounts in your organization, you share your portfolios with them. You can share in several ways, including account-to-account sharing, organizational sharing, and deploying catalogs using stack sets.

Before you share your products and portfolios to other accounts, you must decide whether you want to share a reference of the catalog or to deploy a copy of the catalog into each recipient account. Note that if you deploy a copy, you must redeploy if there are updates you want to propagate to the recipient accounts.

You can use stack sets to deploy your catalog to many accounts at the same time. If you want to share a reference (an imported version of your portfolio that stays in sync with the original), you can use account-to-account sharing or you can share using AWS Organizations.

To use stack sets to deploy a copy of your catalog, see How to set up a multi-region, multi-account catalog of company standard AWS Service Catalog products.

When you share a portfolio using account-to-account sharing or AWS Organizations, you allow a AWS Service Catalog administrator of another AWS account to import your portfolio into their account and distribute the products to end users in that account.

This imported portfolio isn't an independent copy. The products and constraints in the imported portfolio stay in sync with changes that you make to the shared portfolio, the original portfolio that you shared. The recipient administrator, the administrator with whom you share a portfolio, cannot change the products or constraints, but can add AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) access for end users. For more information, see Granting Access to Users.

The recipient administrator can distribute the products to end users who belong to their AWS account in the following ways:

When you add products or constraints to the shared portfolio or remove products or constraints from it, the change propagates to all imported instances of the portfolio. For example, if you remove a product from the shared portfolio, that product is also removed from the imported portfolio. It is also removed from all local portfolios that the imported product was added to. If an end user launched a product before you removed it, the end user's provisioned product continues to run, but the product becomes unavailable for future launches.

If you apply a launch constraint to a product in a shared portfolio, it propagates to all imported instances of the product. To override this launch constraint, the recipient administrator adds the product to a local portfolio and then applies a different launch constraint to it. The launch constraint that is in effect sets a launch role for the product.

A launch role is an IAM role that AWS Service Catalog uses to provision AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon RDS databases) when an end user launches the product. As an administrator, you can choose to designate a specific launch role ARN or a local role name. If you use the role ARN, the role will be used even if the end user belongs to a different AWS account than the one that owns the launch role. If you use a local role name, the IAM role with that name in the end user's account is used.

For more information about launch constraints and launch roles, see AWS Service Catalog Launch Constraints. The AWS account that owns the launch role provisions the AWS resources, and this account incurs the usage charges for those resources. For more information, see AWS Service Catalog Pricing.

This video shows you how to share portfolios across accounts in AWS Service Catalog.

Relationship Between Shared and Imported Portfolios

This table summarizes the relationship between an imported portfolio and a shared portfolio, and the actions that an administrator who imports a portfolio can and can't take with that portfolio and the products in it.