What is Cloud API?
Definition of Cloud API
Cloud Application Programming Interface (API) is a type of API calls that provides programmatic means of creating, accessing and managing applications, hardware, and services on the cloud. It provides the programming interface to access different cloud computing services provided by cloud vendors. It is similar to the standard API framework but is designed specifically for cloud computing environments.
Brief Description of Cloud API
Cloud computing provides access to many different applications, development platforms and computing infrastructure through internet. Cloud application programming interface (API) are software requests and procedures that enable cloud computing services to be accessible and delivered over the internet. The API implemented for Cloud Infrastructure services enable the provision of hardware resources, storage, authentication, application, database, virtual machines and virtually any other cloud based service. However, API use cases varies based on the cloud delivery model i.e. different API set for SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and more.
Typically, each cloud vendor provides its own set of API’s. These API’s are integrated and configured by end users / subscribers/ organizations within their applications to access, use and manage cloud services. The two popular cloud API frameworks used in most cloud computing services are REST & SOAP.
