The Open Service Broker API

Jerome Louvel from Restlet introduced me to the Open Service Broker API the other day, a “project allows developers, ISVs, and SaaS vendors a single, simple, and elegant way to deliver services to applications running within cloud-native platforms such as Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, and Kubernetes. The project includes individuals from Fujitsu, Google, IBM, Pivotal, RedHat and SAP.”

Honestly, I only have so much cognitive capacity to understand everything I come across, so I pasted the link into my super secret Slack group for API super heroes to get additional opinions. My friend James Higginbotham (@launchany) quickly responded with, “if I understand correctly, this is a standard that would be equiv to Heroku’s Add-On API? Or am I misunderstanding? The Open Service Broker API is a clean abstraction that allows ‘services’ to expose a catalog of capabilities, as well as the ability to create, use and delete those services. Sounds like add-on support to me, but I could be wrong[…]But seems very much like vendor-to-vendor. Will be interesting to track.”

At first glance, I thought it was more of an aggregation and/or discovery solution, but I think James is right. It is an API scaffolding that SaaS platforms can plug into their platforms to broker other 3rd party API services. It allows any platform to offer an environment for extending your platform like Heroku does, as James points out. It is something that adds an API discovery dimension to the concept of offering up plugins, or I guess what could be an embedded API marketplace within your platform. Opening up wholesale and private label opportunities for API providers to sell their warez directly on other people’s platforms.

The concept really isn’t anything new. I remember developing document print plugins for Box back when I worked with the Mimeo print API in 2011. The Open Service Broker API is just looking to standardize this approach so hat API provider could bake in a set of 3rd party partner APIs directly into their platform. I’ve recently added a plugin area to my API research. I will add the Open Service Broker API as an organization within this research. I’m probably also going to add it to my API discovery research, and I’m even considering expanding it into an API marketplace section of my research. I can see add-on, plugin, marketplace, and API brokering like this grow into its own discipline, with a growing number of definitions, services, and tools to support.