A microservice catalog serves as a centralized interface that provides engineering teams with a comprehensive overview of all the microservices within an organization, facilitating better management and scalability. It helps standardize microservice profiles by including essential details like service ownership, dependencies, versioning, and links to relevant tools, which are crucial for maintaining efficiency as the number of services grows. The catalog not only offers visibility but also integrates a self-service layer, allowing developers to perform actions such as deploying services, managing configurations, and provisioning environments without relying heavily on DevOps support. This approach enhances developer experience by reducing the cognitive load and speeding up the time to recovery during incidents, while also ensuring that metadata stays current and unified across various platforms. Despite its benefits, creating and maintaining a microservice catalog involves challenges like ensuring consistent identifiers, managing distributed data sources, and aligning with evolving DevOps practices. Best practices suggest keeping the catalog simple and maintaining a single source of truth, whether in a Git-based or designated database system, to streamline service delivery and improve overall quality.