The second new VMware Cloud Service is Service Broker. Service Broker delivers a common catalog that aggregates content in native formats from multiple clouds and platforms including services designed in Cloud Assembly. Service Broker enriches multi-cloud environments by bringing policy-based management which gives IT and cloud admins control over a wide variety of policies including who can access resources and on what clouds specific resource configurations can be deployed.

How? Service Broker provides simple, self-service access to multi-cloud infrastructure and application resources from a single catalog, without requiring proprietary tools. With Service Broker , operations teams can more effectively govern resource access and use and enforce security, deployment and business policies across multi-cloud environments.

Service Broker has three main roles:

  • It is a catalog for curated templates from multiple clouds.
  • It governs usage of templates and services through policy definition and configuration.
  • It is a broker between Cloud Assembly-managed services and 3rd party managed services.

The basic use case is creating a storefront where one can publish curated templates, such as, Cloud Assembly Blueprints, AWS Cloud Formation Templates (CFT), Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, VMware vRealize Orchestrator-based XaaS templates, Kubernetes Helm Charts, etc. One can assign access policies on these templates to other project members within an organization. One can also simplify the consumption of these templates using custom forms. These forms can simplify retrieval and specification of input variables from external sources.

In a multi-cloud environment, it is very important to be able to manage templates, services and resource usage through policies, such as, access policies, lease policies, resource usage policies, quota or capacity policies, approval policies etc. Service Broker enables these policies.

And finally, Service Broker will support brokerage of services across clouds and orchestration systems. This will help central engineering or IT teams to play the role of the broker of services enabling developers to consume these curated services. Consumption becomes intuitive through the graphical UI or API.

 

More information can be found here.