Last month the Open Service Broker API working group released the latest version of the specification, v2.14. This version collects new features, bug fixes and miscellaneous improvements collected over the last 10 months since v2.13. As always, details can be found in the release notes, but you can read about some of the most interesting changes below:
Fetching Service Instances and Bindings
The specification now supports fetching information for previously created Service Instances and Bindings. This presents a range of possibilities for platforms, including fetching credentials (e.g. if they’ve rotated), extended health check information, or previous configuration parameters. Consider a Service Broker that can provision a Redis cluster, where the number of nodes is configurable:
At some later point in time, the operator may determine a need to increase or reduce capacity, but how do they know the current allocation, in order to make a relative adjustment?
The new supported endpoints allow this kind of information for Service Instances and Bindings to be fetched from a Service Broker.
Asynchronous Service Bindings
For some time now, the Open Service Broker API has supported asynchronous flows for Service Instances. This has existed in order to support long running operations, for example, creating or destroying virtual machines. Broker authors now have the ability to support similar operations as part of the Service Binding lifecycle with the familiar Last Operation pattern.
Non-Basic Authentication Methods
Up to this point, the specification only supported Basic Authentication between Platforms and Service Brokers; for some use cases, this may not provide adequate security characteristics, and others already have support for differing authentication schemes. In order to provide the flexibility necessary, we have now extended the Platform to Service Broker Authentication section such that an out of band agreement can be made outside the specification. Details on these can be found in the Platform Features wiki.
OpenAPI 2.0
We now have an OpenAPI document describing the specification!
Compatibility Matrix
We now have a Platform Compatibility document describing which sections of the specification are supported by particular platforms!
Upcoming
You can stay up to date with what the community is working on by checking out the Roadmap & Release Planning project on GitHub.