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Alex Ley

New Open Service Broker API Videos from Cloud Foundry Summit Europe & Cloud Native Con Europe 2017

By | Blog

Recently there have been an array of talks that highlight the progress of the Open Service Broker API and the innovative service brokers and platform integrations the community is creating. In this post you will find some of the highlights from Cloud Foundry Summit and Cloud Native Con!

Cloud Foundry Summit Europe (October 2017)

The recent Cloud Foundry Summit European edition in Basel had a strong focus on the Open Service Broker API project with a mix of talks from developers, analysts and contributors.

Hell Freezes Over: The New Reality of Open Cloud Services and the OSBAPI

The first talk to highlight is from Josh McKenty and Colin Stevenson of Pivotal. With an entertaining format and style, Josh and Colin discuss the impact of the Open Service Broker API in the cloud-native space to enable portability of cloud services across industries and vendors.

Dualing Platforms: Build Services for Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes Using the Open Service Broker API

Alex Ley and Matt McNeeney of Pivotal gave a demo of how you can leverage a service broker from both Cloud Foundry and Kuberenetes. The demo highlights how far the Kubernetes Service Catalog project has come and that the multi-cloud, multi-platform future is quickly becoming a reality with the use of the Open Service Broker API.

Getting a Handle on Your Microservices: Istio and the Open Service Broker API

Morgan Bauer and Christopher Luciano from IBM talked about the recently open-sourced services mesh project, Istio. This talk gives an introduction to Istio and how the project can be used in concert with the Open Service Broker API. The demo starts with two applications bound to the same service (provided by the same service broker) and shows how to leverage Istio to direct traffic between the applications from the web. It also shows how Istio can provide value without any modifications to an application.

Cloud Native Con Europe (Febuary 2017)

The Open Service Broker API and the Kubernetes Service Catalog

Earlier this year at Cloud Native Con in Berlin, Chip Childers of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Paul Morie from RedHat gave an introduction to the Kubernetes Service Catalog incubator project. In this talk, you’ll learn exactly what the Open Service Broker API specification is, its history, how the cross-ecosystem collaboration on the API specification is happening and how the Kubernetes ecosystem is building integrations with the specification. The talk also covers how to get involved in the Kubernetes Special Interest Group (SIG) and includes a project demo!

Panel: Leveraging the Open Service Broker API in Cloud Native Platforms

This panel discussion contains representatives from IBM, Pivotal, Fujitsu, RedHat and Orange who discuss where they want the project to go and why the initiative is important to their companies. Expect to learn more about the Open Service Broker API working group, the future of the project and insights into how leading technology companies are applying this specification to real-world use cases.

Open Service Broker API: August Face to Face Recap

By | Blog

In August, many members of the Open Service Broker API community spent two days at Google’s offices in Seattle discussing the future of the specification. We had participants in person and joining remotely from Red Hat, IBM, Pivotal, Google, SAP, Dell EMC, Microsoft, and Fujitsu representing the Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes communities. The group discussed a wide range of topics and behaviours with a key focus on ensuring that service authors are able to create platform agnostic service brokers in order to grow a diverse ecosystem of cloud-native services.

Open Service Broker API working group at the Fremont Troll in Seattle

A key challenge the group faces as the specification evolves is how to allow for innovation whilst maintaining backward compatibility. As more and more platforms and brokers begin to consume and comply with the specification, the feedback the community is receiving shows the incredible range of services that are being built across the world. Some existing behaviours and clauses are now seeming to be too restrictive, and so the group is putting deprecation strategies in place that will be resolved in the next major version of the specification.

A number of important API behaviours were discussed in detail, including improved authentication using OAuth, supporting the asynchronous creation of service bindings, updating of service bindings and allowing brokers to expose the actions their services’ provide to application developers. These features are incredibly important to all modern platforms including Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, and the group was excited to make progress on these features and move many into the validation through implementation phase (where teams begin working on these features and ensure the proposed specification changes are fit for purpose).

The next specification feature that is being validated by Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes platforms is the ability for service brokers to advertise the configuration parameters they accept for the provisioning of service instances, updating of service instances and creation of service bindings. By using the powerful JSON Schema specification, platform tools (CLIs and UIs) will be able to provide a much-improved developer experience creating and managing services compatible with the specification.

In deep discussion at Google’s Seattle office

The working group is thrilled to see how quickly the community and ecosystem are growing, thanks to the rapid adoption of the specification by service broker authors and the Kubernetes Service Catalog project. We are always looking to welcome new members into the community, so if you work on platforms, service brokers or have any feedback at all, please join our weekly call where the group dedicates time every week to welcome new faces and discuss community interests.

And keep an eye out for the next version of the specification, 2.13 – the second version being launched under the guidance of the Open Service Broker API project committee.

Thanks to Matt McNeeney from Pivotal for the detailed write up.