Provider to Consumer (P2C)

This section describes high-level scenarios of how the Platform Mesh enables secure, declarative, and flexible Provider to Consumer (P2C) interactions across clusters, organizations, and teams. It builds on concepts such as the Account Model, Control Planes, and Managed Service Provider Pattern to unify service exchange.

Kube to Kube

Problem Description

In a direct provider to consumer setting, a provider wants to transfer technical information in a secure way to a consumer for a given service.

• The Provider must expose as little internal detail as possible.
• The Consumer should be able to automatically discover and consume instances of the service.
• Both parties must rely on a secure, declarative, contract-driven interaction.

Solution

The provider can offer a kube-bind backend, allowing the consumer to:

• Authenticate with OIDC.
• Bind the service’s CRD (or any KRM API) into their own cluster.
• Automatically receive service instances and secrets.

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Kube to KCP to Kube

Problem Description

Within an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) setup, multiple teams act both as providers and consumers.

• Database Team (DB) offers a Postgres service.
• Observability Team (Obs) wants to consume Postgres for their Elastic service.
• Webshop Team (WS) wants to consume both Postgres and Elastic services for their applications.

This creates a mesh of dependencies where teams provide and consume services through shared contracts.

Teams use GitOps and declarative manifests to manage components in their respective clusters.

Tools Solution

The Observability Team leverages KRO (Kubernetes Resource Orchestrator) to:

• Instantiate Elastic services.
• Pull Postgres CRDs from their APIBinding using kube-bind.
• Define resource graphs that create Postgres instances using the pulled CRDs.
• The ordered Postgres instances are mirrored back to KCP by kube-bind.

Operator Solution

The Webshop Team uses its own operator built with multicluster-runtime:

• Webshop definitions live in their KCP workspace.
• Operator deploys workloads across clusters.
• Operator consumes Postgres and Elastic bindings.

The operator ensures database and observability service data flows securely into webshop workloads.

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How This Fits Into Platform Mesh

The above flows illustrate how Provider to Consumer interactions are standardized in the Platform Mesh:

• Providers expose declarative APIs using APIExports.
• Consumers bind to those APIs using APIBindings, gaining seamless access through the Account Model.
• Control planes reconcile declarative manifests into real-world capabilities.
• Operators and orchestration tools (kube-bind, KRO, multicluster-runtime) implement automation across boundaries.

This creates a secure, flexible, and decoupled ecosystem where services can be:

• Exposed minimally.
• Discovered and consumed declaratively.
• Composed across organizational or cluster boundaries.
• Governed through the Account Model and Managed Service Provider pattern.

Ultimately, Platform Mesh provides the P2C fabric for multi-team, multi-cluster, and multi-organization service interactions.