Life just got a little bit easier for developers who rely on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud services, thanks to the availability of its new AWS Cloud Control API.

The new tool is a set of common application programming interfaces that the company says will make it much easier for developers to manage AWS services as well as third-party services that run on Amazon’s cloud.

Experienced developers will be familiar with Amazon’s complex web of APIs. They’re used to perform countless tasks, such as creating a new Amazon Simple Storage Service or S3 bucket for a new application that’s going online, or firing up an Amazon EC2 instance to power that app. Others use APIs to build infrastructure as code, while others still rely on them to inspect and improve security, or to provision and configure high-performance computing clusters.

The whole point of having APIs is to keep things simple. APIs can be thought of as software intermediaries that enable two applications to talk to each other without performing any integration. They eliminate the need for lots of coding, but they can still be a major hassle for developers

In a blog post today, AWS Principal Developer Advocate Sébastien Stormacq shed light on one of the major problems developers have with APIs. He explained that each AWS service has its own specific API with unique vocabulary, input parameters and error reporting.

“As applications and infrastructures become increasingly sophisticated and you work across more AWS services, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn and manage distinct APIs,” Stormacq explained. “This challenge is exacerbated when you also use third-party services in your infrastructure, since you have to build and maintain custom code to manage both the AWS and third-party services together.”

AWS Cloud Control API is an effort to cut through all of the API clutter. It provides a standard set of APIs to create, read, update, delete and list resources for hundreds of AWS cloud services, plus dozens of third-party services. Stormacq said the list of supported services will be updated on an ongoing basis, and that it will support most new services from the time they’re launched.

The AWS Cloud Control API exposes five common “verbs” or actions — CreateResource, GetResource, UpdateResource, DeleteResource and ListResource – that Stormacq said will massively simplify the management lifecycle of most services. Developers will be able to create a new service, such as a new instance of Amazon Elastic Container Service or an AWS Lambda function, through the same CreateResource API, and just add the type and attributes of the service they wish to create.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. described AWS Cloud Control API as an “Uber API” and said it’s a direct result of too many APIs clogging up the ecosystem.

“This is what cloud providers are hearing from their customers, who’re trying to keep their IT operations simple,” Mueller said. “AWS is launching AWS Cloud Control API as a single interface that should massively simplify cloud operations for many enterprises.”

Stormacq identified three distinct groups of users who he said will benefit from AWS Cloud Control API, including builders who use AWS Services APIs to manage their own or their customer’s infrastructure. Another group to benefit will be Amazon Partner Network providers such as HashiCorp Inc. and Pulumi Corp., both of which sell tools for building and managing computing infrastructure as code. Customers who use those services will also benefit.

“For example, when using the new Terraform AWS Cloud Control provider or Pulumi’s AWS Native Provider, you can benefit from availability of new AWS Services and features typically on the day of launch,” Stormacq said.

Pricing for AWS Cloud Control API is based on the usage of underlying AWS resources. In the case of third-party services, users will pay for the number of handler operations and the handler operation duration associated with those resources.

Amazon said AWS Cloud Control API is available now in all AWS regions with the exception of China.

Image: Amazon