This week the Open Service Broker API working group released the latest version of the specification, v2.13.
This new version comes three months after the last version and includes a diverse range of new features, bug fixes and improvements. Some of the features the community are most excited about are detailed below.
More information on this release can be found in the release notes, and you can stay up to date with what the community is working on by checking out the Roadmap & Release Planning project on GitHub.
Schemas for configuration parameters
Many service brokers accept configuration parameters that application developers can use when provisioning service instances, updating service instances and creating service bindings. Until now, developers have had to find documentation for a specific service to understand the arbitrary key-value pairs that can be provided, and the allowed values that can be provided for each parameter. From this version onwards, service brokers can now include JSON Schemas in their catalog data that describe the parameters application developers can provide. This allows command-line and other user interfaces to perform up-front validation of parameters, and can even be used to dynamically generate forms with dropdowns, ranges and other UI elements. The example below shows how this can help provide a much better developer user experience.
An example of how JSON schemas can be used to automatically generate intuitive user interfaces
Improved authentication mechanisms
Platform to service broker communication currently uses Basic access authentication, but many people in the community have expressed a desire to investigate more secure and extensible mechanisms like OAuth. A change has been made to the specification in v2.13 that allows platforms to start investigating how other authentication mechanisms could be implemented and how new features could be allowed, such as providing role-based access control for application developers to use features of the underlying service.
New ‘Getting Started’ page
A new page has been added to the Open Service Broker API repository that contains a number of sample service brokers and libraries that the community have been working hard on. This should make it much easier for service authors to see what others are working on in the community, and provide new service authors an easy way to get started and quickly provide their services to cloud-native platforms.