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Open Service Broker API

The Open Service Broker API defines an HTTP interface for managing the lifecycle of backing services. It lets a platform offer a marketplace of services — databases, message brokers, object stores — without knowing how any of them are provisioned, and lets a vendor expose a service to any conforming platform by implementing one interface.

A service broker is responsible for:

  • Advertising a catalogue of service offerings and their plans
  • Provisioning — creating or updating — service instances
  • Creating bindings between a service instance and a client application, which is where credentials are issued
  • Deleting those bindings
  • Deprovisioning — deleting — service instances

The separation matters for the twelve-factor rule that backing services are attached resources: the broker is what makes attaching and detaching a resource an operation the platform can perform, rather than a manual configuration change.

Reference

Section titled “Reference”