Learning the Basics of the Azure APIs
Learn how clouds define APIs and produce SDKs for the APIs.
Now that we know the path to programming the cloud is through APIs, let's learn a bit more about them. It's important to establish some background on how a large system of APIs comes together to form a consistent programmatic interface. We will also learn where we can find code and documentation when we run into challenges.
In this lesson, we are going to discuss how the major clouds define APIs and produce Software Development Kits (SDKs) for programming against the cloud APIs. We will learn where to find these SDKs, and where to find documentation about the APIs and SDKs.
We will also learn about identity, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and resource hierarchy in Microsoft Azure. Finally, we’ll create and log in to a free Azure account, which we will use in the subsequent sections to program the cloud.
A background on cloud APIs and SDKs
Cloud service providers expose APIs for the management of and access to hundreds of services spread across a vast number of regions. These APIs are commonly implemented using Representational State Transfer (REST) or Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC). Within each cloud service provider, there is likely an equal number of engineering teams building these APIs. It is imperative to provide a consistent representation of resources in these APIs so that, when viewed as a whole, each service provides similar behavior. Each cloud service provider takes its own approach to this problem. For example, at Microsoft Azure, the rule for defining REST APIs is codified by the ...