Coffee breaks with REST - Episode #2: Features of ONTAP REST APIs

qw — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:20:25 GMT

In the previous blog Episode#1, you would have read about the basics of ONTAP REST APIs and how it can be accessed from your cluster environment. In this blog, we will learn about the features of ONTAP REST APIs and some cool stuffs that ONTAP REST APIs holds for simplifying your automation infrastructure.

Unlike ZAPIs (ONTAPI), REST APIs simplified storage management. Going forward, New ONTAP features would be developed only on REST APIs, by which it would be the primary external facing API planned for long term. It also provides secure data access through Role based Access Control (RBAC) – supporting ONTAP Admin and SVM scoped admin access. ONTAP REST provides you historical performance for storage objects such as at cluster level, volume, nodes, LUN, Protocol in the samples of hour, day, week, month and up to a year. To understand how simple ONTAP REST APIs is compared to CLI, take a look at the below table that shows how NTFS file security permissions has been simplified with latest ONTAP release,
Comparison of CLI Vs ZAPI Vs REST calls

From the above example, it would have been crystal clear that how ONTAP REST helps in simplifying the automation of ONTAP storage management tasks by reducing the complex calls in traditional ways. Every storage object is identified by a resource in REST – e.g: name, UUID. Whenever a API call is made, it returns a JSON Output and a status code. User can always filter the records of output (e.g, order by sorting, >50, <10). REST uses HAL as a mechanism – by which if an object or attribute is returned it provides encoded HAL link that inturn can be used to obtain more details about the resource. REST is easy to use as it come with key-value pair and thereby reducing the no of steps required to query the storage objects. All POST/PATCH operations are expected to return output in less than 2 seconds as it is handled with asynchronous jobs. The below snapshot shows http methods supported by ONTAP REST,

http methods in ONTAP REST API

In our next Episode#3 of the blog series, we’ll learn how curl commands and postman application can be leveraged to get started with basic API calls in ONTAP REST APIs.
For queries in ONTAP REST, write to slack: #api
Bookmark our One Stop Shop for ONTAP REST resources - https://devnet.netapp.com/restapi.php

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Coffee breaks with REST - Episode #2: Features of ONTAP REST APIs