The vCloud API is used to interact with vCloud Director from outside its native portal. The VMware vCloud API provides support for developers who build interactive clients of VMware vCloud Director using a RESTful application development style. The vCloud API clients and servers communicate over HTTP, exchanging representations of vCloud objects. These representations take the form of XML elements. HTTP GET requests are used to retrieve the current representation of an object, HTTP POST and PUT requests are used to create or modify an object, and HTTP DELETE requests are typically used to delete an object.

The VMware vCloud API was designed to be supported by the ecosystem of vCloud-ready service providers and to interact with what are known as pure virtual resources. Any IaaS cloud architecture consists of raw hardware resources abstracted and presented to end users in the form of vCloud resources. For example, in a VMware vCloud environment, networking and datastore resources are connected to vSphere hosts in the form of switches, port groups, and storage in datastores and datastore clusters. When you build a cloud infrastructure, network and storage configuration should be transparent to the end user.