By Akshay Kannan, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform

Back in 2010, we launched the Google APIs Console, enabling you to manage multiple Google APIs from a single, centralized console.

Today, we are introducing the Google Cloud Console, our next evolution of the APIs Console. The new Google Cloud Console makes managing the over 60 Google APIs housed within easier than ever. It brings an entirely new visual design and integrates tightly with our Cloud Platform services, enabling you to manage an end-to-end application deployment. For the past few weeks, we've given you the ability to opt in to the new experience, and starting soon we'll be making it the default (with the ability to go back to the old experience if you prefer).


You'll notice an entirely new visual design, a hierarchical navigation, and even a friendly new URL structure.


We’ve also simplified the process of getting API credentials. Now, you can register an app on the platform you are building on, then see all the possible credential types for your application, making it easier to quickly grab the credentials you need.


If you haven't already, give the new Cloud Console a shot. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback in the comments section below.



Akshay Kannan is a Product Manager on the Google Cloud Console team. His focus is on providing an integrated, beautiful developer experience for all Google Developers.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Justin Smith, Product Manager

Starting today, Google supports Service Accounts, which provide certificate-based authentication for server-to-server interactions. This means, for example, that a request from a web application to Google Cloud Storage can be authenticated via a certificate instead of a shared key. Certificates offer better security properties than shared keys and passwords, largely because they are not human-readable or guessable.

Service accounts are currently supported by the following Google developer services:

• Google Cloud Storage
• Google Prediction API
• Google URL Shortener
• Google OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server
• Google APIs Console
• Google APIs Client Libraries for Python, Java, and PHP

Over time, more Google APIs and client libraries will be supported.

This feature is implemented as an OAuth 2.0 flow and is compliant with draft 25 of the OAuth 2.0 specification. An application implements the following steps to authenticate with a Service Account:

1. Generate a JSON structure.
2. Sign the JSON structure with a private key, and encode it as a JSON Web Token (JWT).
3. Send the JWT to Google’s OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server in exchange for an access token.
4. Send the access token to Google Cloud Storage or the Google Prediction API.

The Google APIs Client Libraries for Python, Java, and PHP wrap these steps into a few lines of code and abstract the error-prone signing and encoding operations from your applications. We strongly encourage you to use these libraries for this type of interaction. We will be expanding support to other client libraries (including Ruby and .NET). Library developers can find the specifics of the protocol in the OAuth 2.0 Service Accounts documentation.

If you’re a Google App Engine developer, all this might sound similar to what is described in these articles: App Engine & Storage, App Engine & Prediction. Service Accounts generalize this App Engine capability by making it available to other server-side platforms. When using another server-side platform, you can create a Service Account through the Google APIs Console. See the Google APIs Console documentation for more information on creating a Service Account.

As always, we welcome and appreciate feedback. Please post any questions or comments to the OAuth 2.0 Google group.


Justin Smith is a Google Product Manager and works on authentication and authorization technologies. He enjoys woodworking, cycling, country music, and the company of his wife and newborn daughter (not in that order).

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Ion

Chris

By Ion Constantinescu and Chris Cartland, APIs Console Team

It's been nearly one year since we launched the Google APIs Console to help you manage API usage across your sites and apps. We've had some great feedback about what you like (and don't), and are working hard every day to improve the overall experience. To this end, we want to highlight a number of recent enhancements.

Introducing v2 of the Google APIs Console Traffic Reports Page

The Google APIs Console contains a list of traffic reports that display information about how the APIs enabled per project are being used. Based on customer feedback, we've made a few enhancements:

• We have consolidated all API traffic in a single display.
• We now compare traffic between multiple APIs in a single project.
• We now show demographic and usage data about your API requests.

We believe we have made the Traffic Reports page cleaner and more compact without losing any functionality. We already have a list of enhancements we want to make to the page, and we would love to hear from you to help drive our prioritization.


Introducing the Google APIs Console Dashboard

You told us that you want to jump into a project's page and see more of a dashboard that describes what's happening on your project. You said you want to see which services are enabled, the availability of said services, general project administration, and a quick link to how much the project costs to run.


Our new Dashboard page is the first step in delivering on this experience. We will continue to enhance the Dashboard based on your collective feedback, so please take a look and let us know what you think.

New APIs Available in the Google APIs Console

We'd also like to announce some APIs are now available in the Console:

Web Fonts Developer API: this gives access to the metadata available for all families served by Google Web Fonts. You can create dynamic apps that can query Google Web Fonts and get an accurate list of the families currently available.

Google Orkut v2 REST API: this enables you to access select Orkut features. This API works like an extension of the JSON-RPC off-site application API, although it uses a different protocol.

Google Analytics Management API v3: this provides read-only access to Google Analytics configuration data. With the Management API you can list all the Account, Web Property and Profile information for a user, retrieve a Profile ID to use with the Data Export API, determine which goals are active and access their configured names, and retrieve a user's Custom Segments to apply them to Data Export API queries.

Blogger JSON API: this allows client applications to view and update Blogger content in the form of Google Data API feeds. Your client application can use the Blogger Data API to create new blog posts, edit and delete existing blog posts, and query for blog posts that match particular criteria.

We will continue to make changes and update our systems to make your development experience as great as possible. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact us.


Ion Constantinescu is a Google Software Engineer working on the Google APIs Console. He has an academic background in Artificial Intelligence in the field of web service technologies.

Chris Cartland is a former Google Associate Product Manager Intern who worked on the Google APIs Console. He is currently helping CalSol - UC Berkeley's Solar Vehicle Team that designs and builds solar cars capable of racing at highway speeds - prepare to compete in the 2011 Veolia World Solar Challenge in Australia.


Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor