In this post we will learn about the service broker in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. We will explore how this modular component bridges the gap between service providers and the CF tooling. The next post will cover a CF plugin that makes it simple to specify services in your application manifests, so you can create them and bind them to your application with one command. After that, we will give some examples, including a sharded MongoDB instance in your manifest for a truly scalable application and a Riak cluster.
The Service Broker
The Service Broker component in CF allows developers to decouple their apps from the services that they consume. The cf create-service command calls to the broker to create a new instance of a service. You can then include a reference to this service instance in your application’s manifest, or manually issue a bind-service, to associate it to one or more applications. CF will then automatically inject details of the service instance — such as the URL and credentials for consuming it — into your application’s runtime.
