Services & Offerings¶

The Servala service catalog is built around a hierarchy of services, offerings, and instances. Understanding these concepts helps you navigate the catalog and make informed provisioning decisions.

Services¶

A service is a type of managed application -- for example, PostgreSQL, Redis, or Keycloak. Each service has:

• A description of what it provides
• One or more categories (e.g., Databases, Identity Management)
• Links to upstream documentation

Services are provider-agnostic. A service like PostgreSQL can be offered on multiple cloud providers.

Service offerings¶

A service offering is a specific combination of a service and a cloud provider. For example:

• PostgreSQL on Exoscale
• PostgreSQL on Cloudscale
• Redis on Switch

Each offering may have different:

• Available zones (regions/datacenters)
• Compute plans (resource tiers)
• Pricing

Service definitions¶

Behind each offering is a service definition that describes how the service is deployed on the underlying infrastructure. This determines:

• What configuration parameters are available
• Which form fields you see when creating an instance
• How the service maps to Kubernetes resources

You don't need to interact with service definitions directly -- they power the configuration forms you see in the portal.

Service instances¶

A service instance is a concrete, running deployment of a service. When you provision "a PostgreSQL database," you're creating a service instance. Each instance belongs to an organization and runs on a specific offering (service + provider + zone).

See Manage Instances for details on working with instances.