Service Marketplace 

Many IT organizations choose to offer a Service Marketplace as part of their service portfolio. The Marketplace acts as an addition to the cloud infrastructure services provided by large cloud providers like AWS, GCP or Azure.

Why is a Service Marketplace useful?

Certain types of cloud infrastructure services are used by many DevOps teams as they are not specific to a certain application. They provide additional functionality needed to run the application and keep it healthy. Examples are monitoring stacks (ELK stack) or backend connectivity.

In order to avoid that such services have to be rebuilt from scratch and operated by each DevOps team individually, many IT organizations choose to provide and manage these services centrally.

​How do Service Owners provide Marketplace Services?

While IT organizations often have service teams to build and operate such services, there is often no clearly defined process for providing these services to DevOps teams.

The Open Service Broker API (OSB API)

The meshcloud Service Marketplace is based on an open standard, the Open Service Broker API (OSB API). In order to offer a service via the Service Marketplace, the Service Owner only needs to build a light-weight Service Broker and publish it in the Marketplace.

That’s great, because the Service Broker is decoupled from the actual Service Implementation. The implementation can be changed if required, without impacting the Service Broker or the application.

There are different Service Models depending on the use cases: Services can be managed by the Service Team or provided as Unmanaged Services to leave more freedom to developers accessing and configuring the service to their needs.

How do DevOps Teams consume Services from the Marketplace?

As a DevOps team member, I can use the Marketplace like any other Cloud Platform. I see the Service Catalog offered by my company and the corresponding prices of the services. I can easily provision a service without having to pick up the phone or submit a ticket. In meshcloud services are offered on-demand and pay-per-use – the cloud-native way.