Provisioning services through the Kubernetes Service Catalog and the Open Service Broker API

Kubernetes has made deploying our applications much easier, but deploying databases, caches, messaging systems, and other backend services still requires you to deal with the intricacies of each individual service. You still need to refer to the documentation of a service to learn how to configure and deploy it properly. Because of this, developers usually aren’t allowed to provision services themselves, but must instead file a ticket for the ops team and wait for them to do it. And this sometimes takes days, blocking the developers in the meantime. Luckily, the Kubernetes Service Catalog, a new project currently part of the Kubernetes incubator group of projects, aims to solve these problems by allowing developers to provision any service in a standardized way and without having to dive into the specifics of each service too much. In this talk, we’ll explain what the Kubernetes Service Catalog is and how it interacts with external service brokers through the Open Service Broker API (OSB API). We’ll also see how you can implement your own broker to make your own services easily provisionable in any Kubernetes cluster.