Learning the basics of the Azure 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 you can find code and documentation when you run into challenges.

In this section, 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

As we discussed in the previous section, cloud service providers expose APIs...