Which protocol is commonly employed for connecting cloud services?

The choice of RESTful APIs as a commonly employed protocol for connecting cloud services is well-founded due to their lightweight nature and ease of use. REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer, operates over HTTP, making it intuitive and accessible for web-based services. RESTful APIs facilitate communication between client and server in a stateless manner, meaning each request from a client to a server must contain all the information the server needs to fulfill that request. This simplicity allows for high performance and scalability, which are crucial in cloud environments where resources and workloads can rapidly fluctuate.

Moreover, RESTful APIs support a variety of data formats, including JSON and XML, with JSON being particularly favored in cloud services for its concise syntax and compatibility with JavaScript and other programming languages. This versatility enables developers to easily integrate different cloud services and components, fostering interoperability and efficiency within applications that leverage multiple cloud environments.

In contrast, other options serve different purposes or have limitations that make them less suitable for cloud services. SOAP APIs, while robust, generally involve more overhead due to their reliance on XML and strict protocols, making them less flexible than RESTful APIs. GraphQL APIs offer powerful querying capabilities but are not as widely adopted as RESTful APIs for traditional cloud service architectures. Lastly,