Today, Vantage announced the launch of its Cloud Pricing API in Beta. Users may now programmatically access product prices from various cloud infrastructure and service providers—the first of which is AWS EC2 prices. Soon, customers who have connected AWS accounts will have programmatic access to cost and usage data for their accounts as well.
We've heard from numerous users that they'd like programmatic ways of interacting with cloud pricing data in a simple and intuitive structured API. Additionally, through looking at data from our acquisition of EC2Instances.info, we can see that there is a strong desire for programmatic access to simple APIs that couple pricing and product data together.
In addition to all functionality already present on the Vantage dashboard, users may now programmatically access cloud pricing data for free via the Vantage API. After creating a free API key on your Vantage account page, you have access to begin programmatically accessing provider pricing and product data (i.e. show all on-demand EC2 instance type prices). Soon, customers who have connected their AWS accounts to Vantage may programmatically access cost and usage data (i.e. what are currently active EC2 instances and how much they cost, etc).
As the API is in very early Beta, we are looking for your feedback and use cases that you'd like covered and are intentionally starting simple. Please feel free to read the documentation, give us feedback either through our #api channel in our Community Slack Group or via email at support@vantage.sh.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is launching today?
Today, Vantage is launching its Cloud Pricing API in Beta: a programmatic interface for getting pricing information for cloud infrastructure and service providers.
2. How much does this cost?
The Cloud Pricing API is completely free for all registered Vantage users.
3. Where can I learn more about what data and API endpoints are available?
We have dedicated API documentation for the Vantage Cloud Pricing API that can be found here.
4. How do I get access to the API?
All registered Vantage users have access to the API. The only requirement is that you generate an API Access Token from your account settings page.
5. What is an API Access Token?
An API access token is a String that associates your Vantage account with your API requests. Currently, we require an access token to be passed in with every API request to impose rate limiting for the stability of the API for all users.
In the future, we will also expose custom structured data from AWS accounts via the API. To ensure only you have access to that data, you must supply the corresponding API Access Token.
6. How do I generate an API Access Token?
From your account profile, you'll see a portion of the page named "API Access Tokens" where you can create a new API Access Token with a corresponding description.
7. Is there client library support for the Vantage Cloud Pricing API?
Yes. We currently have support for both Ruby and Javascript. The API generates an OpenAPI Specification (Swagger) file which can be used to generate documentation or additional clients. This file is always up-to-date at https://api.vantage.sh/v1/swagger.json. We are looking to add more formal support for other languages going forward.
8. The API is missing data to cover my use case. Will you add support for what I want?
Very likely yes. We are intentionally starting with very basic support to collect feedback from customers on future data and functionality support. Please email us at support@vantage.sh or chime in the #api channel our community Slack group with your desired data or functionality.
9. Is there write functionality available through the API?
Not at this time. However, we are looking to offer future write functionality through the API that will be documented at a later time.
10. What kind of data is currently available?
Currently, the Vantage API couples together on-demand pricing of EC2 instances with basic product information like GB of memory, # of vCPU, # of GPU, clock speed, network performance, and physical processor.
11. Do I need to connect an AWS account to Vantage to use the Vantage API?
No.
