Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style for creating distributed web applications including the design of web services APIs. It establishes a set of technologies for exposing server-based resources and managing their states.

Resources are the foundational components of a REST web services application. There are two important initial tasks when designing a REST API:

Client applications can display and change the resource states through well-defined message flows.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the protocol used by the web services client and server to exchange messages about the resources. It follows the CRUD model based on the generic operations create, read, update, and delete. The HTTP protocol includes request and response headers as well as response status codes.

While there are several message formats available, the most popular option is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). JSON is an industry standard for representing simple data structures in plain text and is used to transfer state information describing the resources and desired actions.

Security is an important aspect of a REST API. In addition to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol used to protect the HTTP traffic over the network, the ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10 REST API also uses access tokens for authentication. You need to acquire an access token and use it on subsequent API calls.

The ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10 REST API performs most requests synchronously, returning a status code when the operation is complete. It also supports asynchronous processing for tasks that require a longer time to complete.

There are several aspects of the ONTAP tools Manager environment you should consider.

ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10 is deployed using the vSphere remote plugin architecture. The software, including support for the REST API, runs in a separate virtual machine.

ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10 exposes a single IP address which provides a gateway to the capabilities of the virtual machine. You need to provide the address during initial configuration and it's assigned to an internal load balancer component. The address is used by the ONTAP tools Manager user interface as well as to access the Swagger documentation page and REST API directly.

In addition to the ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10 REST API, the ONTAP cluster has its own REST API. ONTAP tools Manager uses the ONTAP REST API as a client to perform storage related tasks. It's important to keep in mind these two APIs are separate and distinct. For more information, refer to ONTAP automation.