What is a Service Catalog and why you may need to use it?
As a Kubernetes user/operator, you’ve dealt with a lot of resources to provision different components of your infrastructure. You’ve used resources like Services, configMaps, Secrets. But sometimes you may need to use an external service like the ones typically offered by the cloud provider. Take AWS for example; they provide the RDS service, which is an abstraction layer that lets you gain access to a relational database (MySQL, Postgres,etc.) as a service. When you want to integrate RDS into your existing Kubernetes cluster, you need to be able to deal with it the same way you deal with any other Kubernetes resource. Take authentication as an example. If you want to give your cluster applications access to the RDS database, you will need to do a lot of manual work (and workarounds) to make things work as expected.
To address this need, Kubernetes was extended to include the Kubernetes Service Catalog.
What is Kubernetes Service Catalog?
In a nutshell, the Kubernetes Service Catalog is an extension API that enables applications running inside the cluster to access applications and services provided by external sources, typically the cloud provider. Prominent examples of this pattern include provisioning databases, message queuing applications, object storage services, among others. Gaining systematic access to external resources is possible when the client consumes service brokers that implement the Open Service Broker API specification.
https://www.magalix.com/blog/kubernetes-service-catalog-101
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