Customers of PWS are not restricted to use the only service providers that are listed in the marketplace

Products

• Services Suite

Issue/Introduction

This article applies to all versions Pivotal Web Services (PWS). Customers of PWS are not restricted to use the only service providers that are listed in the marketplace.

Pivotal Web Services (PWS) customers are not restricted to use the only service providers that are listed in the marketplace.

PWS provides a curated marketplace of service providers that you can use to easily setup new services for your applications. While we strive to have a large selection of service providers in the marketplace, we may not be able to cover all the services you need and we may not be able to integrate with all of the providers.

Resolution

You do not need to only use the service providers from our marketplace. If our marketplace does not provide you a service provider that meets your needs, use a different provider or even host your own service.  
 

Using a service provider who is not in the marketplace or providing your own service works the same as using a service provider from the marketplace. You just need to manually perform the steps that are currently handled by the marketplace.
 

Here is a general set of instructions you can follow to use a service provider not listed in our marketplace:

1. Manually sign up for an account with the service provider. This typically involves creating an account and adding the billing information. You will receive a separate bill from that service provider for this because the service provider is not integrated with the marketplace. If you are going to host your own service, this step would be equivalent to setting up your server to run the service, installing the service software, and then configuring it.
2. Create a new service instance using the provider's interface. Most service providers offer a web interface that you can use to interact with their servers and create new instances of the service. This is typical when the service provider gives you an access to the database or some form of storage. If you are hosting your own service, create a new instance of the service and generate the access credentials.
3. Procure an information necessary by your application to connect to the service. This would include things like access URLs, credentials, host names, port numbers, etc.
4. Configure your application to access the service. There are two ways to do this.
   • Create a user provided service to store the service's information with the cf command line utility, bind the service to your application and then, configure your application to pull it's credentials from the bound service. This can be done manually by parsing the VCAP_SERVICES environment variable or by using one of the framework specific methods,  Spring, Grails, or Ruby.
   • Manually configure the service provider's information directly in your application. How you do this depends on your development language and framework, but most offerings have specific support for managing service connection information already. See the documentation for your language and framework to see what is available.

Additional Information

Risks

Here are some things to consider before using a service provider that is not listed in the marketplace:

• You will lose the ability to provision services via the cf tool. Instead, you will need to use the service provider's tools for this.
• You'll have a separate bill for this service provider. Only service providers in the marketplace are able to integrate billing with PWS.
• Pivotal Web Services is located in the Amazon US East #1 data center and if your service provider is not located in the same data center, you may experience more latency when accessing the service.
• Does the service provider support encrypted access to your data? If the provider is not located in the same Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center, the traffic between your application and the service provider will hit the public Internet.