KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Imagine you provide a hosted cloud service - for example, a SaaS metrics platform or a managed database. Your customers use Kubernetes and you want to let them easily consume your service in their Kubernetes workloads. Today, you would build an operator or perhaps a Crossplane provider. But not so long ago there was a Kubernetes project specifically for this use-case: the Service Catalog. The Service Catalog worked with the Open Service Broker API to allow management of hosted services via Kubernetes resources. It provided a standardized, vendor-neutral way to manage and connect to external services from Kubernetes workloads. It never really took off. Operators won the day, and the Service Catalog project was shut down in 2022. This talk explores both the limitations and the advantages of the Service Catalog model. We'll compare and contrast the Service Catalog with operators and Crossplane, and explore where each approach could learn lessons from the others. With that context in mind, we'll think about the future. Kubernetes users will continue to consume cloud services in their applications; what's the best way to facilitate that?