VOOZH about

URL: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/what-is-an-api

⇱ What is an API? | DigitalOcean


What is an API?

Published on December 10, 2020
πŸ‘ What is an API?

An application programming interface (API) is a standardized set of routines, definitions, and protocols that allow developers to build software on top of existing libraries and services. APIs abstract implementation and expose only necessary objects and actions to the developer. This allows for a stable interface while the underlying implementation may change.

Within cloud computing, developers use APIs to manage servers and other resources, most often through conventional HTTP requests.

For more resources about APIs, please visit:

A complete list of our API-related tutorials, questions, and other educational resources can be found on our API tag page.

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about our products

About the author

Senior Technical Writer at DigitalOcean

Category:

Still looking for an answer?

Was this helpful?

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

πŸ‘ Creative Commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Table of contents
  • Deploy on DigitalOcean

    Click below to sign up for DigitalOcean's virtual machines, Databases, and AIML products.

Become a contributor for community

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

DigitalOcean Documentation

Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.

Resources for startups and AI-native businesses

The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.

Get our newsletter

Stay up to date by signing up for DigitalOcean’s Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow β€” whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Start building today

From GPU-powered inference and Kubernetes to managed databases and storage, get everything you need to build, scale, and deploy intelligent applications.

Β© 2026 DigitalOcean, LLC.Sitemap.
Dark mode is coming soon.