Ace the 2026 SnowPro Advanced Architect Exam – Design Your Success!

When an external function needs to reach an outside HTTP service, Snowflake uses an API integration to manage the security and connectivity settings for that call. The API integration stores the endpoint details and the authentication credentials (such as OAuth tokens or API keys) used to authorize requests, keeping sensitive information centralized and separate from the function code. This ensures consistent, secure access to the external service during function execution.

Storage integrations are for external cloud storage access (like S3 or Azure Blob) and not for external HTTP calls. The term data lake integration isn’t a Snowflake construct for this purpose, and network integration handles connectivity and networking aspects rather than storing API credentials.