Introducing Kubernetes Service Catalog and Google Cloud Platform Service Broker: find and connect services to your cloud-native apps

Kubernetes provides developers with an easy-to-use platform for building cloud-native applications, some of which need to use cloud-based services such as storage or messaging. In fact, there are whole catalogs of services that you may want to access from your cloud-native application, but setting them up and connecting to them from Kubernetes can be difficult and require specialized knowledge.

To make it easier to connect to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services from either a GCP-hosted Kubernetes cluster or an on-premises Kubernetes cluster, we are releasing a new services framework: Kubernetes Service Catalog, a collection of services available to Kubernetes running on GCP, and the Google Cloud Platform Service Broker, a hosted service that connects to a variety of GCP services. These offerings are based on the Kubernetes Catalog SIG and the Open Service Broker API.

To begin working with Kubernetes Services Catalog, install it in an existing Kubernetes or Google Kubernetes Engine cluster. Kubernetes Service Catalog then uses the Service Broker to give you access to GCP services such as Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud SQL and others.

This design makes it easy for you to use the environment that you are familiar with (i.e., the kubectl command line) to create service instances and connect to them. With two commands you can create the service instance and set the security policy to give you application access to the resource. You don’t need to know how to create or manage the services to use them in your application.

Based on open-source APIs, Kubernetes Service Catalog and the Service Broker give you access to a rich ecosystem of services to incorporate into your applications. Brokers for Cloud Foundry and other environments are already available.

This beta release allows you to focus on the services you need to get your job done without the hassle of knowing how the services are built or worrying about the infrastructure you need to run them. Support for the Kubernetes Service Catalog will be rolling out in the Google Cloud Console UI over the next few days. We’ll add more GCP services to the Service Broker as we move forward, opening up a whole new range of services for your applications.

For more information on how you can get started using GCP services from your Kubernetes cluster, visit the documentation.