Surface nanoscale axial photonics (SNAP) is a novel platform for fabrication of photonic circuits at the optical fiber surface and their characterization with unprecedented sub-angstrom precision. Their fabrication usually consists of exposures to a CO2 laser beam, which locally anneals the optical fiber and releases tension frozen into the fiber during manufacture. This results in fabrication of microresonators with an effective radius variation on the order of nanometers. In this paper, the ideas and applications of SNAP technology and concentrate on our recent findings obtained in 2016~2017 are overviewed. In particular, it describes our theoretical and experimental results on SNAP at the capillary fiber for applications in microfluidics, frequency comb generation in SNAP bottle resonators, and optomechanics of SNAP bottle resonators.