Service APIs overview
Bigtable provides REST/HTTP and gRPC interfaces.
We strongly recommend that you use our Cloud Bigtable client libraries instead of writing your own. Our client libraries include many important features that can be challenging to implement correctly, such as authentication and retries.
If the Cloud Bigtable client library for your preferred language does not meet your needs, open a GitHub issue for it instead of writing your own client library.
Supported languages include C#, C++, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, PHP, and Ruby. You should write your own client library only when you use a programming language that is not supported.
gRPC API
You can use the .proto service definition for Bigtable to generate your own gRPC client library in any language that gRPC supports. Use these resources to generate a client library:
- Cloud Bigtable Data API service definition
- Cloud Bigtable Instance Admin API service definition
- Cloud Bigtable Table Admin API service definition
- gRPC documentation: Everything you need to generate and use your own gRPC client code
- RPC Data API reference: Language-independent overview of the RPC surface of Cloud Bigtable API (the Data API)
- RPC Admin API reference: Language-independent overview of the RPC surface of the Cloud Bigtable Admin API
REST/HTTP API
Bigtable provides a REST interface for the Admin API. You cannot use REST to access the Data API.
There are many different ways to access the REST interface for Bigtable. To create your own clients, use the following resources:
- REST Admin API reference
- Guidelines for working with Google HTTP APIs
- API Discovery Service: Exposes machine-readable metadata about the REST/HTTP API surface to help you create client libraries, tools, and plugins
- Client samples: Built with REST/HTTP APIs and the Google API Discovery Service.
What's next
- Learn about the client libraries for Cloud Bigtable.
- Complete a quickstart for creating a gRPC client library.
- Read reference documentation for the Cloud Bigtable RPC Data API and RPC Admin API.
- Read reference documentation for the REST Admin API.