Technical requirements

There are a few technical requirements that may need to be fulfilled if you want to get the most out of this chapter:

• A GitHub account
• A Replit account (which has a single sign-on with GitHub)
• A Hugging Face account
• A Google account
• Any computing device with an internet connection and a command line interface
• The ability to tolerate my writing style

Well, if you can get those in hand, then you are ready to start your journey in this chapter. Let’s get going.

Introducing API calls

To define API calls, let’s start with what an Application Programming Interface (API) is. An API is a software interface that offers your application access to functions and processes from other applications. Think of it like this: when a user tries to get information from an application, they do so through the user interface (UI). The API has a similar function for software, so you could call API the UI of software.

Now, API calls are made for a number of reasons:

• You don’t want to write the underlying logic for a big feature yourself (trust me, a lot of the time, you don’t.
• The API gives access to resources that you ordinarily would not have (i.e., creating a Virtual Machine using the API of a cloud provider)
• You just want to get some information into your application (public APIs are very good for this)

Any coding library that you use for code is technically an API. You pull the library in and you call it to perform a function for your application. So, you can see why the definition of APIs can be confusing sometimes. But the point is this: more things are APIs than are not APIs. Everything you see in an app or a website comes from APIs.

So, let’s dive into a couple of examples of how to use APIs to our benefit in DevOps.