The InfluxDB v2 API provides a unified approach to querying, writing data to, and assessing the health of InfluxDB instances. Buckets are named locations in InfluxDB where time series data is written to, and each bucket has a retention policy that describes the duration for which data is kept within that bucket. To create a bucket, one needs an All Access Token, orgID, and payload structure for the POST request from the API documentation. The script provided in the tutorial allows users to create buckets with specific retention policies, such as expiring data every 24 hours. Listing buckets with the InfluxDB v2 API can also be done using a similar script, which prints all of the user's tokens and bucket information. Understanding how to manage buckets with the API is useful for IoT application development and other tasks.