Strategies for Parsing Service Information In Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry’s service marketplace provides self-service access to a curated set of services that have their lifecycle automatically managed by the platform. Part of the lifecycle of any service instance involved connecting that service to an application through a process called “binding”. There are a variety of mechanisms that an application can use to lookup the information that a binding represents, and I’ll try to write up some of the best practices. When a service instance is bound to an application in Cloud Foundry, the connection information and credentials for that service instance get exposed to the application as a block of JSON in an environment variable called VCAP_SERVICES. The format of that JSON is similar to the following: { "service-short-name": [ { "binding_name": null, "credentials": { "service-specific-key1": "service-specific-value1", "service-specific-key2": ...