PCF 05 - Managed and User-Provided Services

• What is a service? Can you name some examples?

  service is a resource reserved on demand examples: database on a shared or dedicated server, access to a SaaS application

• What is the "marketplace"? Does it show all services?

  A marketplace is a listing of all service brokers and their corresponding catalogs which can be used by the apps deployed into cloud foundry by creating respective service instances.

  All market place services can be seen using: cf marketplace

  All services ( Managed & User-Provided) inside a particular space can be seen using: cf services

• What is the difference between a managed and user-provided service?

  Managed service is a service that is available in marketplace. User-provided service instances enable developers to use services that are not available in the marketplace with their applications running on Cloud Foundry.

• How would you create a managed service?

  cf create-service SERVICE PLAN SERVICE_INSTANCE

• How would you use a managed service?

  cf bind-service APP_NAME SERVICE_INSTANCE [-c PARAMETERS_AS_JSON]

• How would you create a user-provided service?

  cf cups SERVICE_INSTANCE [-p CREDENTIALS] [-l SYSLOG_DRAIN_URL] [-r ROUTE_SERVICE_URL]

• How would you use a user-provided service?

  cf bind-service APP_NAME SERVICE_INSTANCE [-c PARAMETERS_AS_JSON]

• What is VCAPS_SERVICES? Why is it important?

  it is an environment variable containing connection details of bindable services that Cloud Foundry added after binding the services instance to the application.

• How do services interact with spaces?

  Every application and service is scoped to a space. Use service keys when you want a set of credentials for use by clients other than the application in the same space. Not all services support service keys. Some services support credentials through application binding only.

pluralsight recap

• What is the difference between a managed service and a user-provided service instance?

  A managed service is advertised in the marketplace

  User provided service are provisioned outside of the platform

• Would it be advisable for a 12 factor app to store a configuration in a local file?

  No, because the application would have to be rebuild to change that configuration.

• Does a 12 factor app make a distinction between local and third party services?

  No, it doesn't. Both should provide location and credential information through the config, through the operating system environment variables

• After binding a service to an application, why is the application restarted, or restaged?

  So the application can have access to the new environment variables. The container is immutable, so once you bind a service to an application, we'll need to throw that one away by either restarting or restaging, or create a new one.

• Why could we restart versus restage?

  Restage rebuilt the application droplet.

• Whe does it need to be rebuilt?

  When there's new dependencies to pull in