Book Image

IBM SmartCloud Essentials

By : Edwin Schouten
Book Image

IBM SmartCloud Essentials

By: Edwin Schouten

Overview of this book

IBM, the oldest technology company in the world, has a wide variety of powerful cloud services to offer from its IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Being able to differentiate them, and knowing how to use them efficiently gives you a competitive advantage over others. Starting with the basics of cloud computing, this guide covers the wide range of cloud components, services, and solutions in the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Following on from this, you'll be introduced to the public , Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service - IBM SmartCloud Enterprise; before peeking into the future of IBM cloud services. Using this book, you will discover the advantage of both traditional enterprise computing and public cloud computing. You will explore IBM's portfolio of cloud computing solutions ranging from infrastructure services (IaaS), to business services (BPaaS), and private to public cloud. You will be taken through a number of in-depth use-cases, examples, and hand-on exercises that will help you to take advantage of infrastructure as a service solution IBM SmartCloud Enterprise quickly and easily. You will learn everything you need to know about the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, including how to take advantage of cloud computing within your organization.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Using REST (and other) APIs


The Application Programming Interface (API) services for IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise provides you with the ability to manage your instances by using third-party applications. As the heading suggests, different APIs are available for this.

  • The first building block of the APIs is the REST API; it is flexible and simple to use, and implements clients for providing Representational State Transfer (REST) based endpoints. The REST API can be used for applications such as JAX-WS, SOA, XUL, and cURL.

  • Second, there is the Java API which is a wrapper around the REST API; each Java API method calls the REST API in turn.

  • Lastly there is the Command Line Interface (CLI) API which is ideal for scripting languages such as Shell and PERL. The CLI API calls the Java API, which in turn calls the REST API.

The following figure depicts the different APIs and their interdependence.

User guides and references

Each of the different APIs also has a user guide of its own; all are available...