[0041] Figure 3 illustrates an exemplary data plane, according to an embodiment of the present invention. Figure 3 illustrates Service Provisioning and Consumption. As shown in Figure 3, Service Provider (SP) may include a service provisioning API at 310. Platform Component (PC) may include a service provisioning API client as shown by 312. Service Framework Registry (SRF) may include a service information and policy metadata REST API as shown by 314. Connection 320 supports synchronously or asynchronously provisioning of service instance. In addition, applications may be enabled to communicate with provisioned Service Instance(s). Platform marketplace may be represented by 316. 

[0042] As shown in Figure 3, users may consume services by provisioning service instances interacting with the Platform. The PC may invoke the SP OSB API, with parameters passed in by the user. Additional request headers may be added by the PC for tracing, logging and validation purposes. The SP OSB API may receive the request, validate the payload and/or provision a service instance, either synchronously or asynchronously. In addition, once the service is ready to be consumed, the user may bind the service instance to an application, which may invoke the SP OSB API via the PC. This API call may return a payload including credentials and/or network information. The PC may encrypt credentials and make the necessary firewalls rules to allow for traffic to flow between applications and service instances. 

[0043] The various embodiments of the present invention may be further extended to provide a wide range of features and functionality. An embodiment of the present invention may provide automated credentials injection in the service instances. The framework may inject transparently in the application runtime the credentials required to consume the service instance. The credentials may be accessed on the fly from a vault, e.g ., an enterprise secret vault, in a 

