Replacement for Open Service Brokers

[agracey]

We are removing Open Service broker support soon but the use case it fills is a pretty useful and important one. I'd like to open a discussion around possible replacements for it. Please expand this list if you have ideas!

Potential ideas:

1. Reimplement service-catalog/minibroker but with a much simpler API than OSBA (and publish spec under new name)
   Could work with partners on this
2. Crossplane integration
3. Static helm charts or deployments
4. Partner with a DB hosting provider
5. ???

[agracey]

Matt is actually looking at a solution here. @jimmykarily, let's chat after kubecon about what he's looking to build. I think it's something we could pretty easily integrate with and it might be worth seeing if we can help as well.

[agracey]

I need to get this out of my head so here's some basic requirements from my perspective:

Easy to integrate with

Other tooling should be able to query/reflect currently available services and the schema needed to create an object.

Full feedback loop

A developer shouldn't have to know the implementation details of the service to be able to consume it. This means that secrets and their values are formatted in expected and conventional ways.

Sane division between providers (operators) and consumers (developers in our case)

There should be a good contract between the two audiences.

Providers would like to provide limited configuration, ease of future maintenance, and a way to move between different environments without additional engineering work.

Consumers would like to have predictable access to services, to move between offerings with minimal overhead, and the ability to consume standard interfaces (such as MySQL) without knowing what is implementing it (mariadb for example).

Easy to add new services/brokers

It should be very easy to add and remove services from the system. Hopefully just a kubectl apply

Simple interface to implements

One of the main issues with OSBA was the complexity. We need an interface that is easy to implement without knowledge of any specific programming language or constructs.