The Service Offering Metadata process allows you to understand the naming conventions used by the providers so that you can avoid duplication in the tenant and avoid any confusion about the meaning of the terms that you use when creating service offerings in the Enterprise Marketplace Catalog.

All Kyndryl applications such as Enterprise Marketplace and Cost & Asset Management (CAM) draw from a common standard Service Metadata Library so that there is standardization of the names and attributes of the service offerings and their bindings to Kyndryl Modern Operations Applications service lifecycle management features supported by the apps.

This standardization ensures that both applications and third-party systems can use Service Metadata APIs to access a common, standard Provider and Service Metadata Library. This library ensures that there is no conflict or re-invention for provider names, service names, service attribute taxonomy, service descriptions, and so on.

The Provider and Service Metadata Catalog is a shared catalog of all services supported by providers. It shows whether a service has been already onboarded on your tenant. The Provider and Service Metadata Catalog provides the following information for existing supported providers:

Kyndryl Modern Operations Applications applications push their service metadata to the Provider and Service Metadata Catalog so that it can be used as a centralized repository of service metadata. This process is driven by the Kyndryl Modern Operations Applications application service lifecycle and standardizes the process for defining/managing/reusing service metadata across the applications and Kyndryl Modern Operations Applications workflows.

Service Offering Metadata Common Actions Service therefore supports standardizing the data model and management process around operations metadata such as high-level modeling on ops supported, insights, recommendations, and other aspects of a service's metadata depending on capabilities supported across Kyndryl Modern Operations Applications for various lifecycle management features implemented by Kyndryl Modern Operations Applications applications.

The following are standard terms used with the Service Offering Metadata Common Actions Service:

Service:
A managed software offering that can be ordered and provisioned by customers or discovered for operations/governance. Services discovered/provisioned have metadata that can include supported operations.
Service Broker:
Service brokers manage the lifecycle of the services.
Service Offering:
The advertisement of a service in the Enterprise Management Catalog. The terms “service” and “service offering” are often used interchangeably.
Service Plan:
The representation of the costs and benefits for a given variant of the service offering, potentially as a tier.
Service Instance:
An individual deployment of a service offering or service.
Service Binding:
A request to use a service instance. As part of this request, there might be a reference to the entity, also known as the application, that will use the service instance. Service bindings will often contain the credentials that can then be used to communicate with the service instance.
Service Composition:
A collection of services where many smaller services are combined into a larger service. Composite services can be advertised as individual service offerings.
Service Blueprint:
A uniform description of a cloud service offering that abstracts away all specific technical details and complexities to facilitate the cloud application developers with the selection, customization, and composition of cross-layered cloud services across various vendors.
Service Metadata:
Metadata that provides additional information about the service offering.