# Overview

Welcome to Cloud Search Service API Reference. Cloud Search Service (CSS) provides hosted, distributed search engine services. It is fully compatible with open-source Elasticsearch and supports multi-condition retrieval, statistics, and reporting of structured and unstructured texts.

This document provides CSS API description, syntax, parameters, and examples. CSS provides APIs for cluster management and snapshot management. You can call these APIs to easily create, query, delete, restart, and scale clusters.

You can search for information you need according to Table 1.

Table 1 Overview
Chapter | Description
--- | ---
API Overview | API constituents and list
Environment Preparation | Prerequisites for using the APIs.
API Calling | Representational State Transfer (REST) message bodies, calling methods, and examples
APIs for each module | APIs provided by CSS
Common Parameters | Common parameters, status codes, and error codes of CSS APIs

Parent topic: Before You Start