Functional overview

The IBM Spectrum Scale™ management API is a REST-style API that provides interoperability between a client and server over a network. These APIs allow authenticated users to perform day-to-day storage management tasks.

The following list provides the salient features of the REST-style APIs:
  • Resource-based
  • Stateless
  • Client-server
  • Cacheable
  • Layered system
REST is a resource-based service system in which requests are made to the resource’s Universal resources identifier (URI). This invokes a response from the resource in the JSON format. An IBM Spectrum Scale management API resource is a collection of all the objects of the same type in a cluster, such as all the filesets. A resource element is an instance of a resource, such as a particular fileset named fileset1. In a REST API request, a resource or a resource followed by a resource element appears as the last term in the request, except for any trailing HTTPS parameters. The following example request ends with a resource, filesets, and therefore it indicates this as an operation that affects all the filesets that are part of a file system named gpfs0:
https://198.51.100.1:443/scalemgmt/v2/filesystems/gpfs0/filesets
Corresponding URL in the IBM Spectrum Scale management API version 1 is given in the following example:
https://198.51.100.1:8191/scalemgmt/v1/filesets?filesystemName=fs1
In contrast, the following example ends with a resource followed by a resource element filesets/fileset1, and therefore indicates an operation that affects this particular fileset, such as creating or deleting the fileset:
https://198.51.100.1:443/scalemgmt/v2/filesystems/gpfs0/filesets/fileset1
Corresponding URL in the IBM Spectrum Scale management API version 1 is given in the following example:
https://198.51.100.1:8191/scalemgmt/v1/filesets/fileset1?filesystemName=fs1
The kind of operations that can be performed on the resources or a resource element are directed by the HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and in some cases by parameters in the HTTPS request. The following list provides the meanings of the basic HTTP methods used in the requests:
  • GET: Reads a specific resource or a collection of resources and provides the details as the response.
  • PUT: Updates a specific resource or a collection of resources.
  • DELETE: Removes or deletes a specific resource.
  • POST: Creates a new resource.
Parent topic: IBM Spectrum Scale management API