Managing Service Brokers in Cloud Foundry

This page assumes you are using cf CLI v6.16 or later.

In order to run many of the commands, you must be authenticated with VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs as an admin user or as a space developer.

Quick start

Given a service broker that has implemented the Service Broker API, two steps are required to make its services available to end users in all orgs or a limited number of orgs by service plan.

Registering a broker
Making plans public

Registering a broker

Registering a broker causes Cloud Controller to fetch and validate the catalog from your broker, and save the catalog to the Cloud Controller database. The basic auth username and password which are provided when adding a broker are encrypted in Cloud Controller database, and used by the Cloud Controller to authenticate with the broker when making all API calls. Your service broker should validate the username and password sent in every request; otherwise, anyone could curl your broker to delete service instances. When the broker is registered with an URL having the scheme https, Cloud Controller will make all calls to the broker over HTTPS.

As of cf-release 229, CC API 2.47.0, Operations Manager supports two types of brokers: standard brokers and space-scoped brokers. A list of their differences follows:

Standard Brokers

Publish service plans to specific orgs or all orgs in the deployment. Can also keep plans unavailable, or private.

Created by admins, with the command cf create-service-broker

$ cf create-service-broker mybrokername someuser somethingsecure https://mybroker.example.com

Managed by admins
Service plans are created private. Before anyone can use them, an admin must explicitly make them available within an org or across all orgs.

Space-scoped brokers

Publish service plans only to users within the space they are created. Plans are unavailable outside of this space.
Created by space developers using the command cf create-service-broker with the --space-scoped flag
```
$ cf create-service-broker mybrokername someuser somethingsecure https://mybroker.example.com --space-scoped
```
Note: If a space developer runs cf create-service-broker without the --space-scoped flag, they receive an error.
Managed by space developers
Newly-created plans automatically publish to all users in their space.

Making plans public

After an admin creates a new service plan from a standard broker, no one can use it until the admin explicitly makes it available to users within a specific org or all orgs in the deployment.

See the Access Control topic for how to make standard broker service plans available to users.

Multiple brokers, services and plans

Many service brokers may be added to a Operations Manager instance, each offering many services and plans. The following constraints should be kept in mind:

It is not possible to have multiple brokers with the same name.
Prior to Cloud Foundry API (CAPI) v1.71, the service ID and plan IDs of each service advertised by the broker must be unique across Operations Manager.
With CAPI v1.71 or later, the service ID and plan IDs of each service advertised by the broker must be unique only within the broker and can overlap ids defined in other brokers.
GUIDs are recommended for the service ID and plan IDs of each service.

Note: If your deployment uses CAPI v1.71 or later, you can add multiple brokers with the same URL. In this case, the brokers must have different names. CAPI v1.70 and earlier do not support this feature.

See Possible errors below for error messages and what do to when you see them.

Listing service brokers

$ cf service-brokers
Getting service brokers as admin...
OK

Name            URL
my-service-broker https://mybroker.example.com

Updating a broker

Updating a broker is how to ingest changes a broker author has made into Cloud Foundry. Similar to adding a broker, update causes Cloud Controller to fetch the catalog from a broker, validate it, and update the Cloud Controller database with any changes found in the catalog.

Update also provides a means to change the basic auth credentials cloud controller uses to authenticate with a broker, as well as the base URL of the broker’s API endpoints.

$ cf update-service-broker mybrokername someuser somethingsecure https://mybroker.example.com

Renaming a broker

A service broker can be renamed with the rename-service-broker command. This name is used only by the Operations Manager operator to identify brokers, and has no relation to configuration of the broker itself.

$ cf rename-service-broker mybrokername mynewbrokername

Removing a broker

Removing a service broker will remove all services and plans in the broker’s catalog from the Operations Manager Marketplace.

$ cf delete-service-broker mybrokername

Note: Attempting to remove a service broker will fail if there are service instances for any service plan in its catalog. When planning to shut down or delete a broker, make sure to remove all service instances first. Failure to do so will leave orphaned service instances in the Operations Manager database. If a service broker has been shut down without first deleting service instances, you can remove the instances with the CLI; see Purge a Service.

Purging a service

If a service broker has been shut down or removed without first deleting service instances from Operations Manager, you will be unable to remove the service broker or its services and plans from the Marketplace. In development environments, broker authors often destroy their broker deployments and need a way to clean up the Cloud Controller database.

The following command will delete a service offering, all of its plans, as well as all associated service instances and bindings from the Cloud Controller database, without making any API calls to a service broker. Once all services for a broker have been purged, the broker can be removed normally.

$ cf purge-service-offering service-test
Warning: This operation assumes that the service broker responsible for this
service offering is no longer available, and all service instances have been
deleted, leaving orphan records in Operations Manager's database. All knowledge of
the service will be removed from Operations Manager, including service instances and
service bindings. No attempt will be made to contact the service broker; running
this command without destroying the service broker will cause orphan service
instances. After running this command you may want to run either
delete-service-auth-token or delete-service-broker to complete the cleanup.

Really purge service offering service-test from Operations Manager? y
OK

Purging a service instance

The following command will delete a single service instance, its service bindings and its service keys from the Cloud Controller database, without making any API calls to a service broker. This can be helpful in instances a Service Broker is not conforming to the Service Broker API and not returning a 200 or 410 to requests to delete the service instance.

$ cf purge-service-instance mysql-dev
WARNING: This operation assumes that the service broker responsible for this
service instance is no longer available or is not responding with a 200 or 410,
and the service instance has been deleted, leaving orphan records in Cloud
Foundry's database. All knowledge of the service instance will be removed from
Operations Manager, including service bindings and service keys.

Really purge service instance mysql-dev from Operations Manager?> y
Purging service mysql-dev...
OK

purge-service-instance requires cf-release v218 and cf CLI 6.14.0.

Note: When multiple brokers provide two or more service instances with the same name, you must specify the broker by including the -b BROKER flag in the cf purge-service-instance command.

Catalog validation behaviors

When Operations Manager fetches a catalog from a broker, it will compare the broker’s id for services and plans with the unique_id values for services and plans in the Cloud Controller database.

Event	Action
The catalog fails to load or validate.	Operations Manager will return a meaningful error that the broker could not be reached or the catalog was not valid.
A service or plan in the broker catalog has an ID that is not present among the `unique_id` values in the marketplace database.	A new record must be added to the marketplace database.
A service or plan in the marketplace database are found with a `unique_id` that matches the broker catalog's ID.	The marketplace must update the records to match the broker's catalog.
The database has plans that are not found in the broker catalog, and there are no associated service instances.	The marketplace must remove these plans from the database, and then delete services that do not have associated plans from the database.
The database has plans that are not found in the broker catalog, but there are provisioned instances.	The marketplace must mark the plan inactive and no longer allow it to be provisioned.

Possible errors

If incorrect basic auth credentials are provided:

Server error, status code: 500, error code: 10001, message: Authentication
failed for the service broker API.
Double-check that the username and password are correct:
    https://github-broker.a1-app.example.com/v2/catalog

If you receive the following errors, check your broker logs. You might have an internal error.

Server error, status code: 500, error code: 10001, message:
    The service broker response was not understood

Server error, status code: 500, error code: 10001, message:
    The service broker API returned an error from
    https://github-broker.a1-app.example.com/v2/catalog: 404 Not Found

Server error, status code: 500, error code: 10001, message:
    The service broker API returned an error from
    https://github-broker.primo.example.com/v2/catalog: 500 Internal Server Error

If your broker’s catalog of services and plans violates validation of presence, uniqueness, and type, you will receive meaningful errors.

Server error, status code: 502, error code: 270012, message: Service broker catalog is invalid:
Service service-name-1
  service id must be unique
  service description is required
  service "bindable" field must be a boolean, but has value "true"
  Plan plan-name-1
    plan metadata must be a hash, but has value [{"bullets"=>["bullet1", "bullet2"]}]