Google's Cloud API provides libraries to programmatically access and manage your GCP environment. You can access your GCP environment directly from your server applications, using the client libraries which are supported on multiple languages. Cloud APIs are JSON REST and also provide an RPC interface. This RPC interface allows clients to make API calls using gRPC.

You can use the API dashboard which provides the project's API usage, traffic bandwidth, error rates, and so on. We looked at the API dashboard earlier in this book.

Before using an API, it needs to be enabled by using the console APIs & Services | Library:

Select a project and click on the specific API that you want to enable for that project. For example, you may want to only enable the compute engine API for your project. In the preceding screenshot, you will see different services with...