Warning
gRPC is required for using the Cloud Bigtable API. As of May 2016, grpcio is only supported in Python 2.7, so importing :mod:`gcloud.bigtable` in other versions of Python will fail.
API requests are sent to the Google Cloud Bigtable API via RPC over HTTP/2. In order to support this, we'll rely on gRPC. We are working with the gRPC team to rapidly make the install story more user-friendly.
Get started by learning about the :class:`Client <gcloud.bigtable.client.Client>` on the :doc:`bigtable-client-intro` page.
In the hierarchy of API concepts
- a :class:`Client <gcloud.bigtable.client.Client>` owns a :class:`Cluster <gcloud.bigtable.instance.Instance`
- a :class:`Cluster <gcloud.bigtable.instance.Instance` owns a :class:`Table <gcloud.bigtable.table.Table>`
- a :class:`Table <gcloud.bigtable.table.Table>` owns a :class:`ColumnFamily <gcloud.bigtable.column_family.ColumnFamily>`
- a :class:`Table <gcloud.bigtable.table.Table>` owns a :class:`Row <gcloud.bigtable.row.Row>` (and all the cells in the row)