APIs are one of the main elements of cloud services. All major cloud service providers expose REST APIs to allow you to programmatically access their services and capabilities. SOAP and REST are the two most common ways of exposing APIs, whether to external, partner, cloud, or internal developers.
The concept of API management is to publish these web APIs for consumption, and includes capabilities such as monitoring, security, and documentation.
This presentation introduces basic concepts of APIs, API management, cloud REST services, and a brief walkthrough of WSO2 API Manager and the Oracle API Gateway to see how you can centrally publish, expose, and secure APIs, essentially virtualizing your backend services.