After dedicating the first part of its cloud conference to partners, Amazon.com Inc. is turning the spotlight back inward with a bevy of new services that narrow the management gap with on-premise environments. The retail giant is executing its latest enterprise gambit under the umbrella of the AWS Service Catalog, which promises to give admins a comparable level of control as they have behind the firewall while still maintain the self-service experience users have come to expect.

Unlike some of the similar portals that have been introduced in the last few months, most recently Dell Inc.’s provider-agnostic Cloud Marketplace, the AWS Service Catalog focuses not so much on making it easier for customers buy resources but rather on helping allocate them. The platform allows practitioners to choose what offerings employees can access and in what configurations, determine how much of each users may consume and make the selection available to the target audience in an easily discoverable format.

The Service Catalog also includes more gradual controls that make it possible to customize who can use what by individual, group or department and even restrict how many times an application is launched to maintain compliance with licensing requirements. It’s complemented by a Key Management Service that extends that centralization to encryption with capabilities for handling data security across different services and everything the task entails, from hardening existing applications to setting up automated code rotations.

To round out the offer, key usage data is automatically fed into the  logging service introduced at last year’s re:Invent for auditing purposes. Organizations that require more comprehensive visibility into their environments can now supplement that functionality with something called AWS Config, which continuously records contribution changes in an account and sends out alerts when necessary. It also retails the data to support historical security analysis.

Amazon hopes that combination of gradual controls and increased transparency will convince organizations to use Aurora, a new ultra-fast, hosted MySQL implementation positioned as an alternative to the expensive on-premise databases powering mission-critical applications. Besides the tightened security, the retail giant is also promising greater than 99.99 percent uptime with the service and automatic recovery from “most” failure scenarios under less than 60 seconds without the need to rebuild database caches.

Yet however impressive, that’s still four nines away from true high-availability. This makes it unlikely organizations will suddenly start moving their mission-critical transactional workloads into the public cloud, but at one tenth the cost of traditional alternatives, Aurora makes for a highly attractive offer that will no doubt manage to attract considerably interest nonetheless.

Because no public cloud launch would be complete without something for developers, Amazon is rolling out its four new enterprise offerings in conjunction with a fifth service called CodeDeploy that aims to simplify the process of launching and updating code on AWS. The solution makes it possible to patch applications while they’re running, provides the ability to undo changes and last but not least, offers support for third party development tools.