Application Programming Interface - a way for different software applications to communicate with each other. Like a waiter who takes your order and brings food from the kitchen.
When you check the weather on your phone, the weather app uses an API to get current weather data from a weather service.
These are managed services for publishing, securing, monitoring, and scaling APIs. They commonly support authentication/authorization, throttling, logging/metrics, and routing to backend services (e.g., serverless functions, containers, or VMs).
Explore real-world architectures from our community that use API: