Binding workloads using Service Binding Operator

Creating service binding

  • Binding services or workloads defined by CRD requires adding appropriate rights to the Operator service account, either by cluster administrators or Operator providers. Please check the RBAC requirements section for further details.

  • If the users do not have permissions to read binding data or modify workload resource, the Service Binding Operator prevents such users to bind services to workload. Adhering to the RBAC requirements avoids unnecessary permission elevation for the user and prevents access to unauthorized services or workloads.

Application developers must bind a workload to one or more backing services by using a binding secret. This secret is generated for the purpose of storing information to be consumed by the workload.

As an example, consider that the service you want to connect to is already exposing the binding data. In this case, you would also need a workload to be used along with the ServiceBinding custom resource (CR). By using this ServiceBinding CR, the workload sends a binding request with the details of the services to bind with.

Example of ServiceBinding CR in the binding.operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1 API:
apiVersion: binding.operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
kind: ServiceBinding
metadata:
  name: account-service
spec:
  application: (1)
    version: v1
    group: apps
    kind: Deployment
    name: online-banking
  services: (2)
  - version: v1alpha1
    group: example.com
    kind: AccountService
    name: prod-account-service
1 Specifies a list of service resources.
2 The sample application that points to a Deployment or any other similar resource with an embedded PodSpec.
Example of ServiceBinding CR in the servicebinding.io API:
apiVersion: servicebinding.io/v1alpha3
kind: ServiceBinding
metadata:
  name: account-service
spec:
  workload:  (1)
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    name: online-banking

  service:
    apiVersion: example.com/v1alpha1
    kind: AccountService
    name: prod-account-service
1 The application resource is a deployment resource with the name online-banking.

As shown in the previous examples, you can also directly use a ConfigMap or a Secret itself as a service resource to be used as a source of binding data.