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 exposed as network API services to customers, 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 to Cloud API endpoints directly or by using client libraries.
Cloud APIs are part of the
Google Enterprise
APIs
category in the Google Cloud console
API Library
.
Accessing Cloud APIs
You can access Cloud APIs from server applications with our
client libraries
in many popular programming languages, from mobile apps via the
Firebase SDKs
,
or by using third-party clients. You can also access Cloud APIs with the
Google Cloud CLI
tools or
Google Cloud console
.
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. You can also use third-party
clients.
For more information about our client libraries, see
Client Libraries Explained
.
TLS encryption
All Cloud APIs accept only secure requests using TLS encryption.
- If you are using one of our client libraries, in-transit encryption is handled for you by the library.
- If you are using your own gRPC client, you need to authenticate with Google (which requires TLS) following the instructions in the
gRPC authentication guide
.
- If you are creating your own HTTP client, see our
HTTP guidelines
.
You can find out more about how traffic to Google Cloud services is secured in
our
Encryption in Transit
security guide.
Private Service Connect
Enterprise customers often want to access Cloud APIs privately for security
and compliance reasons. You can use Private Service Connect to
set up and manage such access within your VPC networks.
For more information, see
Configuring Private Service Connect
.
Step-by-step examples
See the following step-by-step guides that use the client libraries for some
popular APIs:
API Design Guide
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.
You can reference our API Design Guide to have a better understanding of Cloud
APIs.
If you want to study the interface definition of Cloud APIs, you can visit the
Google APIs
repository on GitHub.
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
API Dashboard
in the Google Cloud console. You
can also create custom dashboards and alerts in Cloud Monitoring.
For more information, see
Monitoring API usage
.
Google Enterprise APIs
Google Enterprise APIs are high-stability APIs, ready for enterprise use with
support options available.
For more information, see
Google Enterprise APIs
.
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.
Get started for free