Deleting Kubernetes Service Catalog bindings

tl;dr

svcat unbind <instance-name> # this will remove all the bindings for this service catalog instance
svcat unbind --name <binding-name> # this will remove a specific binding

Motivation

I recently used my company’s Kubernetes Service Catalog to spin up an Elasticache instance for an application. When you create a ServiceInstance, you need to bind it to an application in order to get connection information for that instance.

From the Service Catalog documentation:

After a new instance has been provisioned, a cluster operator must bind to the managed service to get the connection credentials and service account details necessary for the application to use the service.

That said – I messed up the original binding.

I tried to create a ServiceInstance but missed a parameter, resulting in two things:

• The service instance has an orphaned mitigation
• The service binding had an error

What I did

We use the svcat cli to interact with Service Catalog.

Once I found out what the issue was with the ServiceInstace, I patched up the yaml config and ran an apply. This resulted in an error because the service instance + binding was in a bad state.

In a panic, I renamed the metadata.name of the service instance and binding, and ran an apply again. This time, the apply worked.

Something didn’t feel right. I should not be blocked on bad state to create a ServiceInstance/ServiceBinding.

Therefore, I found that I can first delete the bad binding by running the following command:

svcat unbind --name <binding-name>

Once the bad binding was removed, I was able to deprovision the bad instance by running:

svcat deprovision <instance-name>

Closing thoughts

When I looked up the webpage for svcat, I found the information I was looking for. However, I didn’t find a blog or any kind of article with the errors/keywords of issues that I was looking for. Thus, this post was born.

I hope that this is helpful.