Connecting an IBM Cloud application

Applications running in IBM Cloud can be bound to your IBM Cloud® Databases for Elasticsearch deployment.

Connecting a Kubernetes service application

There are two steps to connecting a Cloud databases deployment to a Kubernetes service application. First, your deployment needs to be bound to your cluster and its connection strings stored in a secret. The second step is configuring your application to use the connection strings.

The sample app in Connecting a Kubernetes service tutorial provides a sample application that uses Node.js and demonstrates how to bind the sample application to a Cloud Databases deployment.

Before connecting your Kubernetes Service application to a deployment, make sure that the deployment and cluster are both in the same region and resource group.

Binding your deployment

Public or private endpoints

Public endpoints - If you are using the default public service endpoint to connect to your deployment, you can run the cluster service bind command with your cluster name, the resource group and your deployment name.

ibmcloud ks cluster service bind <your_cluster_name> <resource_group> <your_database_deployment>

Private endpoints - If you want to use a private endpoint (if one is enabled on your deployment), then first you need to create a service key for your database so Kubernetes can use it when binding to the database.

ibmcloud resource service-key-create <your-private-key> --instance-name <your_database_deployment> --service-endpoint private

The private service endpoint is selected with --service-endpoint private. After that, you bind the database to the Kubernetes cluster through the private endpoint with the cluster service bind command.

ibmcloud ks cluster service bind <your_cluster_name> <resource_group> <your_database_deployment> --key <your-private-key>

Verify - Verify that the Kubernetes secret was created in your cluster namespace. Running the following command, you get the API key for accessing the instance of your deployment that's provisioned in your account.

kubectl get secrets --namespace=default

For more information, see the Kubernetes service documentation.

Configuring in your Kubernetes app

When you bind your application to Kubernetes Service, it creates an environment variable from the cluster's secrets. Your deployment's connection information lives in BINDING as a JSON object. Load and parse the JSON object into your application to retrieve the information your application's driver needs to make a connection to the database.

The Connection Strings page contains a reference of the JSON fields.

For more information, see the Kubernetes service docs.