What is a service broker?

Service brokers are the link between the consumer and the provider. The broker holds information about the services provided, carries out the details of ordering, provisioning, and connecting these services to the application being built by the consumer, and automates steps that used to be performed by IT operations with multiple infrastructure management tools.

When building applications, teams need a streamlined way to select and consume services from a provider, whether it’s an on-premise database from within their organization or a messaging service from a public cloud like Amazon Web Services. Service catalogs provide a place for teams to find these services, but don’t provide all the functionality needed to connect the consumer and the provider.

In Red Hat® OpenShift®, service brokers are based on the Open Service Broker API, the standard interface between application platforms and service brokers. At Red Hat, we’re proud to collaborate within the container ecosystem to advance the Open Service Broker API, and to contribute to the Kubernetes Service Catalog on which the OpenShift Service Catalog is based.

Your hybrid cloud strategy should encompass more than simple application portability across infrastructures. Service brokers make it possible to use the services most suitable for your applications, no matter who provides them or where they’re hosted. What’s more, they eliminate the operational complexity of provisioning a heterogeneous set of services across multiple providers.

Red Hat has worked closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop the AWS Services Broker, which makes it easy to provision and consume AWS services from within Red Hat OpenShift. Together, the AWS Service Broker and Red Hat OpenShift make it easier to build better applications faster, using the best infrastructure and services from your on-premise resources and the public cloud.

• Develop faster: Streamline access to services for your teams and provide a consistent experience for application developers no matter where they choose to build.
• Deploy anywhere: Red Hat OpenShift lets you deploy applications anywhere—on-premises or in global availability regions from our hundreds of cloud partners.
• Scale with confidence: Grow your business and scale your applications with secure, elastic services and on-demand infrastructure from our cloud partners.

Red Hat OpenShift is a single platform uniting operations and development teams to build and deliver applications. The Red Hat OpenShift Service Catalog uses the Open Service Broker API to help teams build hybrid cloud applications with consistent and automated provisioning of cloud and on-premises services.