CF marketplace no service offerings found - cloud-foundry

Question

I am running cloud foundry on a Kubernetes cluster on the Digital Ocean platform. I am able to deploy apps successfully via cf push APP_NAME without a database. Now I would like to run my Django app with a PostgreSQL database. When I run from terminal cf marketplace it does now show me the list of offerings/services available in the marketplace.
cf marketplace
Output
Getting services from marketplace in org abc-cforg / space abc-cfspace as admin...
OK
No service offerings found
Output from cf version
cf version 6.53.0+8e2b70a4a.2020-10-01
I have tried with cf version 7 as well but no luck.
I am quoting from this doc -
No problem. The Cloud Foundry marketplace is a collection of services that can be
provisioned on demand. Your marketplace may differ depending on the Cloud Foundry
distribution you are using.
What should I be doing now to get the list of service offerings in the marketplace? I googled quite some time but could not find a fix.
I have an account in pivotal as well but this is deprecated already as per this link.

Answer 1

By default, there will not be any services in the marketplace. As a platform operator, you'll need to add the services that you want to expose to your CloudFoundry users.
If you look at a public CloudFoundry offering, you can see that this is done for you, and when you run cf m you'll get the list of services that the public provider and their operations team set up for you.
When you run your own CF, that's on you to set up.
There are a couple of things you can do:
The easy option is to use user-provided services. These are not set up through the marketplace, so you simply ignore that command altogether.
You would instead go procure your service from somewhere else. You mentioned using Digital Ocean, so you could procure one of their managed databases. Once you have your database credentials, you would run cf cups -p username,password,host my-service (these are free-form fields names, enter whatever makes sense for your service) and, when prompted, enter the info. This creates a user-provided service, which can be bound to your apps and works just like a service you'd acquire through the marketplace.
The more involved option requires deploying more infrastructure to run a service broker. The service broker talks to Cloud Controller and provides a catalog of available services. Those services are what Cloud Controller displays when you run cf m.
There are some community-provided brokers and commercial ones as well. I think a lot of these brokers also assume a Bosh deployment and not Kubernetes, so be careful to read the instructions and see if that's a requirement.
A quick scan through and here are a few that seem like they should work:
https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/cf-containers-broker
https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/s3-broker
https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/rds-broker