Beginner's question on iControl

Mayank, the APIs are a piece of our management offerings. The GUI and command line are manual interfaces while our APIs allow for programmatic and orchestration based control. For some cases where you make relatively few changes and manage a small amount of devices and objects, maybe a manual interface like the GUI or tmsh would be enough. For many users though, numerous repetitive tasks requires automation and that requires an API.

Feature-wise, the API is the foundation that our GUI and TMSH is built on so if you are looking for what you can do with an API vs. the GUI, then the answer is that they complement eachother. But, I can say with the API, you can develop processes for updating 1000's of objects. There are typos of workflows that you could do with APIs in minutes that would take hours or days manually.

Hope that clears things up.

-Joe