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Marketplace Overview#

The SCO Marketplace is a centralized catalog where cloud users discover and provision solutions published by service providers.

What is the Marketplace?#

The marketplace serves as the service catalog for your SCO platform, providing:

  • Solution Discovery: Browse available services and their capabilities
  • Self-Service Provisioning: Request and deploy services without manual intervention
  • Documentation: Access solution-specific documentation and examples
  • Version Management: See available solution versions and updates

How the Marketplace Works#

For Service Providers#

Service providers (platform engineers) create solutions using Crossplane, KRO, or custom operators. These solutions are published to the marketplace, making them available to cloud users.

Publishing Flow:

  1. Create a solution (XRD + Composition)
  2. Define solution metadata and documentation
  3. Publish to KCP as an APIExport
  4. Solution appears in the marketplace

For Cloud Users#

Cloud users browse the marketplace, discover solutions they need, and provision instances into their projects.

Consumption Flow:

  1. Browse the marketplace
  2. Select a solution (e.g., PostgreSQL)
  3. Configure the solution instance
  4. Provision into a project
  5. Manage the solution lifecycle

Solution Types#

SCO provides flagship solutions out of the box and supports custom solutions:

Flagship Solutions (Built-in)#

  • Virtual Machines: Full Linux VMs using OpenShift Virtualization
    • Multiple instance types (compute-optimized, memory-optimized, general purpose)
    • Cloud-init support for bootstrapping
    • Public and private networking options
    • SSH access
  • OpenShift Hosted Clusters: Full OpenShift clusters using hypershift
    • Complete Kubernetes/OpenShift cluster provisioning
    • Managed control plane and worker nodes
    • Configurable node pools and scaling
    • etcd backup and disaster recovery

Custom Solutions (Optional)#

Platform teams can add additional solutions:

  • Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB (using Crossplane compositions)
  • Message Queues: Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS
  • Storage: S3-compatible storage, persistent volumes
  • Observability: Monitoring and logging solutions
  • Custom Services: Any service defined via Crossplane

Marketplace Features#

Search and Filter#

Quickly find solutions by:

  • Name or keyword
  • Category or type
  • Provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, on-premises)
  • Version

Solution Details#

Each solution in the marketplace includes:

  • Description: What the solution provides
  • Configuration Options: Available parameters and settings
  • Requirements: Prerequisites and dependencies
  • Documentation: Usage guides and examples
  • Versions: Available versions and changelogs

Solution Status#

Solutions have different states:

  • Available: Ready to provision
  • Beta: Preview version, may have limitations
  • Deprecated: Older version, newer alternative recommended

Access Methods#

The marketplace is accessible through multiple interfaces:

  • Console UI: Visual interface for browsing and provisioning
  • kubectl: List and describe solutions using kubectl get solutions
  • API: Programmatic access for automation
  • Terraform: Discover and provision using Infrastructure as Code

Solution Lifecycle#

Once provisioned from the marketplace, solution instances follow a lifecycle:

  1. Requested: User creates a solution instance CR
  2. Provisioning: Backend resources are being created
  3. Ready: Solution is ready to use
  4. Updating: Configuration changes are being applied
  5. Deleting: Solution is being removed

What's Next?#