Connecting an IBM Cloud application

Gen 2

Applications running in IBM Cloud can be bound to your IBM Cloud® Databases for MongoDB 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 a 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.

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

  1. Private endpoints

    To use a private endpoint, create a service key for your database. Kubernetes uses it when binding to the database.

    ibmcloud resource service-key-create <YOUR-PRIVATE-KEY> --instance-name <INSTANCE_NAME_OR_CRN> --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> <INSTANCE_NAME_OR_CRN> --key <YOUR-PRIVATE-KEY>

  2. 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 in your account.

    kubectl get secrets --namespace=default

    More information on binding services is found in 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 Getting connection strings page contains a reference of the JSON fields.

For more information, see the Kubernetes Service documentation.