Clouds, Kubernetes, monitoring and CI/CD all speak HTTP and JSON, so calling APIs is a big part of DevOps automation. This module covers how to call them and handle their data in Python with the requests library.

• Call a public API with requests.get() and parse JSON with .json()
• Work with list, dict, and set
• Read and write files, including JSON
• Keep API keys out of source code using environment variables

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

• collections_demo.py — list / dict / set basics
• call_api.py — fetch and filter a JSONPlaceholder todo
• jokes_api.py — switch between two endpoints at runtime
• file_io.py — read/write text and JSON files
• stock_market_api.py — a real API using a key from an env var

python collections_demo.py
python call_api.py

# stock_market_api needs a free Alpha Vantage key
export ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY="your_key_here"
python stock_market_api.py

Never hardcode API keys in source — stock_market_api.py reads the key from ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY. Get a free key at https://www.alphavantage.co/support/#api-key

Fetch a GitHub user and save it to JSON:

1. Call https://api.github.com/users/<username>.
2. Print name, public_repos, followers, location.
3. Save the full response to github_user.json with json.dump(..., indent=2).
4. Bonus: handle a non-existent user (GitHub returns 404) with response.raise_for_status() inside a try / except.