Google Cloud APIs are a key part of Google Cloud Platform, allowing you to easily add the power of everything from storage access to machine-learning-based image analysis to your Cloud Platform applications.
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 our SDK command line tools or our Google Cloud Console web UI.
Multiple surfaces: REST and gRPC
All our Cloud APIs expose a simple JSON REST interface that you can call directly or via our client libraries. Some of our latest generation of APIs also provide an RPC interface that lets clients make calls to the API using gRPC: many of our client libraries use this to provide even better performance when you use these APIs. You can find out more about API interfaces and library types in Client Libraries Explained.
Regardless of interface type, Cloud APIs use resource-oriented design principles as described in our Google API Design Guide.
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 even latencies, helping you to quickly triage problems with applications that use Google services. You can view this information in the Cloud Platform Console's API Dashboard. You can also create custom dashboards and alerts in Google Cloud's operations suite. You can find out more about monitoring and API metrics in Monitoring your API usage.
Available APIs
The following table lists all currently available Cloud APIs:
| API | Description |
|---|---|
| Compute APIs | |
| App Engine Admin API | Provisions and manages App Engine applications. |
| OS Login API | Associates SSH public keys with Google accounts for accessing Compute Engine instances. |
| OS Config API | Manages OS patches and configurations on Compute Engine instances. |
| Compute Engine API | Creates and runs virtual machines on Google Cloud. |
| Kubernetes Engine API | Builds and manages clusters that run container-based applications, powered by open source Kubernetes technology. |
| Compute Engine Instance Group Updater API | Updates groups of Compute Engine instances. |
| Cloud Functions API | Manages lightweight user-provided functions executed in response to events. |
| Cloud Run API | Deploy and manage user-provided container images that scale automatically based on HTTP traffic. |
| Storage and database APIs | |
| Cloud Bigtable Admin API | Manages your Cloud Bigtable instances, clusters, and tables. |
| Cloud Bigtable Data API | Accesses the NoSQL big data solution for storing terabytes or petabytes of schemaless data. |
| Datastore API | Accesses the schemaless NoSQL document database to provide fully managed, robust, scalable storage for your application. |
| Cloud Spanner API | Creates, deletes, modifies, and lists Cloud Spanner instances and databases. Executes transactions on data stored in Cloud Spanner databases. |
| Cloud SQL Administration API | Creates and configures Cloud SQL instances, which provide fully managed MySQL databases. |
| Cloud Storage API | Stores and retrieves potentially large, immutable data objects. |
| Storage Transfer API | Transfers data from external data sources to a Google Cloud Storage bucket or between Google Cloud Storage buckets. |
| Networking APIs | |
| Cloud DNS API | Configures and serves authoritative DNS records. |
| Data Analytics APIs | |
| BigQuery API | Creates, manages, shares, and queries data. |
| BigQuery Data Transfer API | Simplified data imports to BigQuery |
| Dataflow API | Develops and executes data processing patterns like ETL, batch computation, and continuous computation. |
| Dataproc API | Manages Hadoop-based clusters and jobs on Google Cloud Platform. |
| Cloud Composer API | Fully managed workflow orchestration service. |
| Cloud Life Sciences API | Process, analyze, and annotate genomics and biomedical data at scale using containerized workflows. |
| Pub/Sub API | Provides reliable, many-to-many, asynchronous messaging between applications. |
| Cloud Healthcare API | Standards-based APIs powering actionable healthcare insights for security and compliance-focused environments. |
| Machine learning APIs | |
| AutoML | Train high-quality custom machine learning models with minimal effort and machine learning expertise. |
| Vision API | Integrates Google Vision features, including image labeling, face, logo, and landmark detection, optical character recognition (OCR), and detection of explicit content, into applications. |
| Speech-to-Text API | Uses fast and accurate speech recognition to convert audio, either from a microphone or from a file, to text in over 80 languages and variants |
| Cloud Natural Language API | Analyzes the structure and meaning of text, including sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and text annotations. |
| Cloud Translation API | Translates text from one language to another. |
| Dialogflow API | An end-to-end development suite for conversational interfaces (e.g., chatbots, voice-powered apps and devices). |
| Talent Solutions | Brings machine learning to the job search experience. |
| Management Tools APIs | |
| Cloud Billing API | Retrieves Google Cloud Console billing accounts and associates them with projects. |
| Cloud Billing Budget | View, create, and manage Cloud Billing budgets programmatically at scale. |
| Cloud Billing Catalog API | Programmatic access to the entire public Google Cloud catalog consisting of billable SKUs, public pricing, and relevant metadata. |
| Cloud Build API | Builds images and artifacts in the cloud. |
| Deployment Manager API | Declares, configures, and deploys complex solutions on Google Cloud Platform. |
| Cloud Runtime Configuration API | Provides capabilities for dynamic configuration and coordination for applications running on Google Cloud. |
| Cloud Scheduler API | Fully managed enterprise-grade cron job scheduler. |
| Cloud Tasks API | Allows you to manage the execution, dispatch, and delivery of a large number of distributed tasks. |
| Operations APIs | |
| Cloud Logging API | Writes log entries and manages your logs, log exports, and logs-based metrics. |
| Cloud Monitoring API | Manages your Cloud Monitoring data and configurations. |
| Cloud Debugger API | Examines the call stack and variables of a running application without stopping or slowing it down. |
| Error Reporting API | Groups and counts errors from cloud services, provides read access to error groups and their associated errors. |
| Cloud Trace API | Sends and retrieves trace data from Cloud Trace. Data is generated and available by default for all App Engine applications. Data from other applications can be written to Cloud Trace for display, reporting, and analysis. |
| Security and Identity APIs | |
| Resource Manager API | Provides methods for creating, reading, and updating project metadata. |
| Identity and Access Management API | Manages identity and access control for Google Cloud resources, including the creation of service accounts, which you can use to authenticate to Google and make API calls. |
| Cloud Data Loss Prevention | Fully managed service designed to help you discover, classify, and protect your most sensitive data. |
| Cloud Key Management Service API | Lets you manage cryptographic keys for your cloud services the same way you do on-premises. |
| Binary Authorization API | Manages policies, attestors, and attestations in Binary Authorization. |
| Cloud Asset API | Manages the history and inventory of cloud resources. |
| Managed Infrastructure APIs | |
| Service Management API | Provides methods for publishing managed services and managing service configurations. |
| Service Control API | Provides control plane functionality for managed services, including access control and integration with logging and monitoring services. |
| Service Consumer Management API | Provides utilities to help managed service producers manage their relationships with their services' consumers, including the ability to create and manage tenancy units. |
| Service Usage API | Provides methods to list, enable, and disable APIs in Google Cloud projects. |