Configure a Service Instance Dashboard URL

This guide describes how to expose a dashboard URL for a service instance.

The service instances concepts documentation introduced the idea that a service instance can return a URL to the end-user upon successful provisioning. This URL is typically used to access a service dashboard, but may also be sufficient for an application client to consume the service. This guide describes how to configure your services to return a URL to the end-user.

Dashboard URL Overview

The Service Broker places no restrictions on the dashboard URL. The dashboard URL is generated completely under the control of configuration provided by you. Likewise whether or not to return a dashboard URL is completely under your control.

Returning a Dashboard URL

Whether or not a dashboard URL is returned to the user is dependent up whether the dashboard-url registry key is populated during service instance generation. The registry and system-defined registry keys are discussed further in the registry concepts documentation.

Configuring a Dashboard URL

Consider the following configuration:

apiVersion: servicebroker.couchbase.com/v1alpha1
kind: ServiceBrokerConfig
spec:
  bindings:
    serviceInstance: (1)
      parameters: (2)
      - name: dashboard-url
        required: true
        source:
          format: (3)
            string: 'https://%s.acme.com:12345'
            parameters:
            - registry: instance-id
        destinations:
        - registry: dashboard-url (4)

These are the relevant things to note:

1	The dashboard URL must be defined for the service instance only. The service instance registry will be examined for the presence of the `dashboard-url` registry key.
2	The dashboard URL may be defined during template processing, however for clarity it is usually defined as a configuration binding.
3	How you generate and format the dashboard URL is completely up to you. In this example our service instance will generate a publicly addressable service based upon the instance ID. We can calculate this address using the format parameter source.
4	To make the Service Broker aware of the dashboard URL, set the special `dashboard-url` registry key. This value will be returned when a service instance creation request is successfully accepted.

While we have chosen to provide an example based on a publicly addressable service, you can equally provide a Kubernetes Service to be consumed with in same Kubernetes cluster e.g. http://my-service.my-namespace.