Cloud Foundry Custom User Provided Services(CUPS) and tagging

Custom User Provided Services or CUPS for short is a way to deliver credentials for external services to an application hosted on Cloud Foundry.

Consider a set of credentials represented as a json of the following form:

{
 "hostname": "mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io",
 "jdbcUrl": "jdbc:mysql://mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io:3306/somedb?user=someuser\u0026password=somepass",
 "name": "somedb",
 "password": "somepass",
 "port": 3306,
 "uri": "mysql://someuser:somepass@mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io:3306/somedb?reconnect=true",
 "username": "someuser"
}

I could create a user provided service out of these values using cf-cli. The following is highly bash shell specific, so on a different shell the mileage is likely to vary:

CUPS_PARAM=$(cat <<-'EOF'
{
 "hostname": "mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io",
 "jdbcUrl": "jdbc:mysql://mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io:3306/somedb?user=someuser\u0026password=somepass",
 "name": "somedb",
 "password": "somepass",
 "port": 3306,
 "uri": "mysql://someuser:somepass@mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io:3306/somedb?reconnect=true",
 "username": "someuser"
}
EOF
)

cf create-user-provided-service mycups -p ''"$CUPS_PARAM"''

This Custom User provided service can be bound to an app:

cf bind-service myapp mycups

and the application can retrieve the credentials via an environment variable called VCAP_SERVICES at runtime.

Issue

There is one small issue with the Custom User provided services over normal services created via Service Brokers on Cloud Foundry - there is no simple way to tag a Custom User Provided service. Tags are sometimes useful in getting a little more information about the service bound to an app and is extensively used by Spring Cloud Connectors to connect to services.

Solution

I have written a custom service broker called the CUPS tagging broker using which a service can be created with all the parameters normally passed to create the CUPS, additionally since it is a normal service it can be tagged.

Assuming that the "CUPS tagging broker" has been installed using the instructions here, an equivalent user provided service with tags can be created the following way, with two tags attached to the service:

cf create-service cups-tagging-service default my-cups-tagged -c ''"$CUPS_PARAM"'' -t "tag1, tag2"

If I were to bind this service to an app, the VCAP_SERVICES environment variable of the app would be along these lines:

{"cups-tagging-service":[{
  "credentials": {
    "hostname": "mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io",
    "jdbcUrl": "jdbc:mysql://mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io:3306/somedb?user=someuser&password=somepass",
    "name": "somedb",
    "password": "somepass",
    "port": 3306,
    "uri": "mysql://someuser:somepass@mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io:3306/somedb?reconnect=true",
    "username": "someuser"
  },
  "syslog_drain_url": null,
  "volume_mounts": [

  ],
  "label": "cups-tagging-service",
  "provider": null,
  "plan": "default",
  "name": "my-cups-tagged",
  "tags": [
    "cups-tag",
    "tag1",
    "tag2"
  ]
}]}

See how the two additional tags show up.

That is all there is to the CUPS tagging Service Broker!