When clients interact with the Vault, what kind of request structure do they typically use?

Clients interact with HashiCorp Vault using RESTful requests that typically include JSON payloads. This structure adheres to the principles of REST (Representational State Transfer), which is a widely-used architectural style for designing networked applications.

The use of REST allows clients to communicate with the Vault server through standard HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. Each of these methods corresponds to different types of operations that can be performed on the resources managed by Vault. For example, a POST request may be used to create a new secret or to authenticate a client, while a GET request would retrieve information about a secret.

The choice of JSON for payloads is particularly notable due to its lightweight and easy-to-parse nature, making it a preferred format for data exchange across various web APIs. JSON’s simplicity enhances interoperability, allowing different systems and programming languages to easily consume and generate the data they exchange.

While GraphQL is a flexible query language for APIs, it is not used in Vault's architecture. Similarly, XML formatted requests are largely less favored in modern API designs compared to JSON, and plain text requests do not support the structured data needed to effectively interact with Vault’s capabilities. Therefore, the RESTful requests with JSON payloads accurately reflect the