Using the API#

Warning

gRPC is required for using the Cloud Bigtable API. As of May 2016, grpcio is only supported in Python 2.7, so importing gcloud.bigtable in other versions of Python will fail.

API requests are sent to the Google Cloud Bigtable API via RPC over HTTP/2. In order to support this, we’ll rely on gRPC. We are working with the gRPC team to rapidly make the install story more user-friendly.

Get started by learning about the Client on the Base for Everything page.

In the hierarchy of API concepts

a Client owns a Cluster
a Cluster owns a Table
a Table owns a ColumnFamily
a Table owns a Row (and all the cells in the row)