Cloud Foundry managed services - VCAP var

[Luca de Falco 4]

Hello,

 

I have deployed the sample tibco.bwce.sample.palette.jdbc.Basic.application in Cloud Foundry.

I have used a CF managed service to create a mysql db instance.

It worked fine.

My question is related to the configuration used.

The managed service created has this value as db url :

 

jdbc:mysql://b2b2fea6ad2248:6394b338@us-cdbr-iron-east-02.cleardb.net:3306/ad_ea3dd8fc83b511f

 

It contains the credentials in the url. This value cannot be used to populate the db url in the application profile.

So this value has to be populated in the manifest file explicitily because it s not possible to retrieve this value from the VCAP vars using the naming convention

.credentials. for the application property.

This seems to me a big limitation, because my understanding is the capability to use VCAP vars for configurations is one of the main advantage to use managed services.

If I specify all the db parameters in the manifest, it works also without having the application bound to the service. It's like the app is directly connected to the database cloud instance, as we do if we test the sample from studio using the db parameters.

 

I'd like to understand what are the main advantages to use a managed service if we do not useVCAP to populate application properties.

The points I see : the managed service allows to choose plans and esily create instances of services needed.

It's also not clear to me from a technical point of view, if the application works also without the bound service, if I really need to bound this service or I canjust create the managed service to have the cloud mysql instance and connect directly. In this case maybe I can create a cups service to wrap the connection to the service instance and bound my application to the cups service. In this way I can use VCAP var to populate the application properties.

 

Thanks