New Features in AWS Service Broker for OpenShift and Kubernetes

By Ryan Niksch, Partner Solutions Architect at AWS

The AWS Service Broker is an open source project that allows native AWS services to be exposed directly through application platforms, such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Developers are able to provision and expose Amazon Web Services (AWS) through the Service Catalog, Command Line Interface (CLI), or API without needing to interact with the AWS console, or without having extensive knowledge of AWS.

In 2017, the AWS Service Broker was launched to support a subset of services, focusing on database, queuing, and messaging services. The Service Broker catered for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), to name a few.

In response to customer feedback, the most recent service additions have shifted focus to artificial intelligence and security offerings. Customers are able to provision the services shown in Figure 1 through the AWS Service Broker and expose them through the application platform through a bind process which exports values required to consume the service, such as end points and Amazon Resource Names (ARNs).

New Services Available in the AWS Service Broker

Figure 1 – AWS Service Broker’s latest service additions focus on artificial intelligence and security. 

Support for OpenShift v3.9

The AWS Service Broker has been updated to support OpenShift v3.9, allowing customers to leverage new features such as running behind proxy solutions. Customers are also able to integrate the Service Broker into existing clusters on versions 3.7 and 3.9, or new clusters on the latest OpenShift release.

AWS Service Broker Available Within the OpenShift Quick Start

The AWS Service Broker is now integrated into the Red Hat OpenShift Quick Start, and customers can enable the Service Broker through a parameter when launching the stack. Customers can accelerate the deployment of OpenShift, and immediately integrate native AWS services into their application solutions.

Figure 2 – Parameter settings to enable the Service Broker through the OpenShift Quick Start.

Support for Kubernetes

The AWS Service Broker can be installed and run within native Kubernetes. This is discussed in detail in the AWS Open Source blog on provisioning AWS services through Kubernetes.

New Features for DevOps Teams

Development teams are now able to provision and expose 18 AWS services to their applications, taking advantage of the availability, elasticity, and scalability these services provide while allowing for faster native service adoption.

Operations teams are able to control which teams access the AWS Service Broker through the application platform. This give developers agility while still catering for the concerns of ops and security teams.

Next Steps

Explore how you can bridge the gap between on-premises and Amazon Web Services with the AWS Service Broker >>