Help Center/ Data Warehouse Service / API Reference/ Before You Start
Updated on 2025-09-19 GMT+08:00
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Before You Start

Overview

Welcome to DWS. DWS is a fully-managed and enterprise-level cloud data warehouse service. It is O&M-free, compatible with the PostgreSQL ecosystem, and supports online cluster scale-out and efficient loading of multiple data sources.

This guide explains how to use APIs to manage DWS clusters, including creating, querying, and deleting tags and snapshots. For a comprehensive list of all supported operations, see API Overview.

DWS supports Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs, allowing you to call APIs using HTTPS. For details about API calling, see Calling APIs.

Endpoints

An endpoint is the request address for calling an API. Endpoints vary depending on services and regions. For the endpoints of all services, see Regions and Endpoints.

Basic Concepts

  • Account

    An account is created upon successful registration with the cloud system. The account has full access permissions for all of its cloud services and resources. It can be used to reset user passwords and grant user permissions. The account is mainly for making payments and should not be used for regular management activities. To enhance security, create IAM users within the account and grant them the required permissions for routine management.

  • User

    An IAM user is created by an account to use cloud services. Each IAM user has its own identity credentials (password or access keys).

    API authentication requires information such as the account name, username, and password.

  • Region

    A region is a geographic area in which cloud resources are deployed. Availability zones (AZs) in the same region can communicate with each other over an intranet, while AZs in different regions are isolated from each other. Deploying cloud resources in different regions can better suit certain user requirements or comply with local laws or regulations.

  • AZ

    An AZ contains one or more physical data centers. Each AZ has independent power and network devices. Within an AZ, computing, network, storage, and other resources are logically divided into multiple clusters. AZs within a region are interconnected using high-speed optical fibers to support cross-AZ high-availability systems.

  • Project

    A project corresponds to a region. Default projects are defined to group and physically isolate resources (including compute, storage, and network resources) between different regions. Users can be granted permissions in a default project to access all resources under their accounts in the region associated with the project. For more refined access control, create subprojects under a project and apply for resources in the subprojects. Users can then be assigned permissions to access only specific resources in the subprojects.

    Figure 1 Project isolating model
  • Enterprise project

    Enterprise projects group and logically isolate resources. An enterprise project can contain resources from different regions, and resources can be transferred between enterprise projects.