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Elastic Compute Service
Elastic Compute Service
API Reference
Call methods
Request structure
Call methods
Request structure
Request structure
To call an OpenAPI API, send a request to the specified service endpoint and include the required signature information and API-specific business parameters. The structure of an OpenAPI request is organized as follows. An unencoded URL request for DescribeInstances is used as an example.
Example 1: GET request
Example 2: POST (form) request
- GET and POST indicate request methods. The OpenAPI of ECS supports the following request methods:
- POST request with parameters submitted via a form.
- Action=DescribeInstances specifies the operation to be called, and Version=2020-04-01 specifies the API version.
- Host specifies the service endpoint. For more information, see Service address.
- Region and Service indicate the region and name of the service. For more information, refer to Common parameters.
- HTTP specifies the protocol of the request.
Requests can be sent via either HTTP or HTTPS. We recommend that you use HTTPS for higher security.
Request methods
See the specific requirements of each API operation for request methods.
Warning
- The Action and Version parameters in the common parameters must be included in the query string.
- For GET requests, all parameters must be URL-encoded.
Request parameters
An OpenAPI request consists of two types of parameters: common parameters and API-specific parameters. Common parameters are required for every API call. For more information, see Common parameters. API-specific parameters are unique to each API. See the description of the specific API for details.
Character encoding
Requests and responses are encoded using the UTF-8 character set.
Last updated: 2026.06.18 17:48:23