Google Cloud APIs are programmatic interfaces to Google Cloud Platform services. They are a key part of Google Cloud Platform, allowing you to easily add the power of everything from computing to networking to storage to machine-learning-based data analysis to your applications.
About Cloud APIs
Cloud APIs are implemented as network API services, such as
Cloud Pub/Sub API. Each Cloud API typically runs on one or more
subdomains of googleapis.com, such as pubsub.googleapis.com, and provides
both JSON HTTP and gRPC interfaces to clients over public internet and
virtual private cloud (VPC) networks. Clients can send HTTP and gRPC
requests directly to Cloud API endpoints or by using client libraries.
Accessing Cloud APIs
You can access Cloud APIs from server applications with our client libraries in a wide variety of popular programming languages, from mobile apps via the Firebase SDKs, or by using third-party clients. You can also access the same services via Google Cloud SDK tools or Google Cloud Console UI.
If you are new to Cloud APIs, see Getting Started on how to use Cloud APIs.
Supporting HTTP and gRPC
All Cloud APIs provide a simple JSON HTTP interface that you can call directly or via Google API Client Libraries Most Cloud APIs also provide a gRPC interface you can call via Google Cloud Client Libraries, which provide better performance and usability. For more information about our client libraries, see Client Libraries Explained.
Regardless of the interface type, all Cloud APIs use resource-oriented design principles as described in our API Design Guide, which ensures Cloud APIs to have a simple and consistent developer experience.
Capping your usage
Cloud APIs are shared among millions of developers and users. To ensure fair usage and minimize abuse risks, all Cloud APIs are enforcing rate limits and resource quotas on usage, commonly known as quotas. You can also use these quotas to control your spending on Google Cloud products by reducing your own quota limits. If you need more quotas than the default limits, you need to file quota increase requests.
For more information, see Capping API usage.
Monitoring your usage
Most Cloud APIs provide you with detailed information on your project's usage of that API, including traffic levels, error rates, and latencies. It helps you to quickly triage problems with applications that use Cloud APIs. You can view this information in the Google Cloud Console's API Dashboard. You can also create custom dashboards and alerts in Cloud Monitoring.
For more information, Monitoring API usage.
Available Cloud APIs
To see available Cloud APIs, visit Google Cloud Console's API Library.
Try it for yourself
If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.
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