Application operators bind application workloads with services by creating ServiceBinding resources. The specification’s Service Binding section describes this in detail. The ServiceBinding resource need to specify the service and workload details. The resource kind and apiVersion are required for both the service and workload. For service, you need to specify the name of the resource. For workload, you can specify the name of the resource or a label selector to identify one more workloads. If label selector is used for workloads and there are more than one workload matching the label selector, all of those workloads are going to bound to the same service.

Here is an example ServiceBinding resource with workload identified by name:

apiVersion: servicebinding.io/v1beta1
kind: ServiceBinding
metadata:
  name: account-service
spec:
  service:
    apiVersion: com.example/v1alpha1
    kind: AccountService
    name: prod-account-service
  workload:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    name: online-banking

Here is an example ServiceBinding resource with workload identified by label selector:

apiVersion: servicebinding.io/v1beta1
kind: ServiceBinding
metadata:
  name: online-banking-frontend-to-account-service
spec:
  name: account-service
  service:
    apiVersion: com.example/v1alpha1
    kind: AccountService
    name: prod-account-service
  workload:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    selector:
      matchLabels:
        app.kubernetes.io/part-of: online-banking
        app.kubernetes.io/component: frontend

It is possible to create more than one ServiceBinding resource pointing to the same service. Similarly you can create more than one ServiceBinding resource pointing to the same workload. The service, workload and ServiceBinding resources must be in the same namespace.

By default, the bindings are projected into all regular containers and init containers. But is possible to restrict the projection based a name based filter. You can create a .spec.workload.containers as a list of container names. If it exists, then only the containers matching that name is going to be used to project bindings.

Here is an example with restricted container names:

apiVersion: servicebinding.io/v1beta1
kind: ServiceBinding
metadata:
  name: account-service
spec:
  service:
    apiVersion: com.example/v1alpha1
    kind: AccountService
    name: prod-account-service
  workload:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    name: online-banking
    containers:
    - app
    - backup

The ServiceBinding supports projecting values as environment variables. To project environment variables, define .spec.env with a list of entries. Each entry has a name which is going to be the environment variable and key referring to a binding Secret key and its value is the value of environment variable.

Here is an example with environment variables:

apiVersion: servicebinding.io/v1beta1
kind: ServiceBinding
metadata:
  name: account-service
spec:
  service:
    apiVersion: com.example/v1alpha1
    kind: AccountService
    name: prod-account-service
  workload:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    name: online-banking
  env:
  - name: ACCOUNT_SERVICE_HOST
    key: host
  - name: ACCOUNT_SERVICE_USERNAME
    key: username
  - name: ACCOUNT_SERVICE_PASSWORD
    key: password

Note: You can use the built-in language feature of your programming language of choice to read environment variables from the application. If there is a change in the projected bindings, the container must restart to read updated environment variable values.

The ServiceBinding controller implements a reconciler to bind the Provisioned Service binding Secret into the workload. The Secret referred to by .status.binding on the resource represented by service is mounted as a volume on the resource represented by workload. The directory name of the volume mount is same as the value of .metadata.name. But it can override by setting a .spec.name attribute.

The directory where the volume is mounted is decided based on the value of environment variable SERVICE_BINDING_ROOT. If that environment variable is not present, a location is assigned (often /bindings) and the value is set as the SERVICE_BINDING_ROOT environment variable. This way application can rely on SERVICE_BINDING_ROOT environment variable to lookup bindings.

The ServiceBinding resource allows to override values of type and provider entries. You can set it through .spec.type and .spec.provider attributes.

Service Binding Status

TODO

Workload Resource Mapping

TODO

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

TODO