10 Steps to Cloud Happiness: Step 2 - Use a Service Catalog

Step 2 - Use a Service Catalog

Every journey starts at the beginning and this journey's no exception.

As previously presented in the introduction to this series of articles, you'll be taken through the 10 steps to your cloud happiness.

This journey focuses on the storyline that you're interested due to the push towards a digital transformation and the need to deliver applications in to a cloud service.

This focus on application delivery and all the new moving parts, like containers, cloud, platform as a service (PaaS) and digital journeys might leave you searching for that simple plan to get started. There is nothing like getting hands-on to quickly leverage the experience you've acquired over the years, so let's dive right in.

Previously you were shown how to get a cloud, so what's next?

The service catalog.

Use a service catalog

In the previous article you saw the installation of the OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) led you to an initial service catalog screen. This is a collection of standardized containers, offering each a single development experience that can be ordered in a click.

The strength here is the ability provided by OCP, in the form of the Open Service Broker, to allow you to plug in third party services or your own container offerings.

Looking at what you were give in the previous article when you installed OCP to get your own cloud, the service catalog is populated with various Red Hat product and community offerings in the JBoss middleware domain. There are various storage options available and even a .Net container service available for you to deploy .Net application code.

This year at the Red Hat Summit in Boston there was an announcement around Amazon AWS services being made directly available on OCP. This is an example of third party services being added to the service catalog in OCP. In this case users would be able to seamlessly configure and deploy a range of AWS services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, and Elastic Load Balancing with just a few clicks from OCP directly.

Note that OCP version 3.6 is currently providing a tech preview of the service catalog.

Rest of the story

Looking for container-based application delivery
solution and hybrid cloud ready?

If you are looking for the introduction to the 10 steps series or any of the individual steps:

1. Get a Cloud
2. Use a Service Catalog
3. Adding Cloud Operations
4. Centralize Business Logic
5. Real Process Improvement
6. Human Aspect
7. Retail Web Shop
8. Curing Travel Woes
9. Exploring Financial Services
10. Agile Cloud Service Integration

So stay tuned as this list's tackled one-by-one over the coming weeks and months to provide you with a clear direction towards your very own application delivery in the cloud happiness.