The REST architecture always included the possibility of gateways and proxies in the end-to-end communication path to delegate shared responsibilities out of th

The REST architecture always included the possibility of gateways and proxies in the end-to-end communication path to delegate shared responsibilities out of the user agent or origin server. This balances the need for centralized admin of some things and decentralized deployment of other things. Most microservices systems, even if they're not using HTTP in favor of something like gRPC, Kafka, or Rabbit, are taking a lot of WebArch lessons to heart in how they manage their policies, routes, etc. balancing centralized management over decentralized evolution. The problem with SOA-in-practice was that everything flowed through a monolithic ESB as both client and origin server, that needed to have omniscient knowledge of every route, transformation, etc., and was often a single administrative bottleneck, fault domain, etc. Some SOA frameworks had service mesh patterns where you could deploy decentralized engines with your services, but without cloud IaaS/PaaS circa 2006-2007, there was no way to maintain/deploy/upgrade these policy agents without a heavy operational burden. In sum: CORBA, COM+ or SOAP/HTTP were about mostly-centralized approaches to distributed services, REST was about extreme decentralized evolution over decades, most are looking for something akin to a dial where they can have something a bit more controlled than dozens of independent gRPC/HTTP/Rabbit/Kafka producers-consumers but not stupid like the SOAP/HTTP days. Modern cloud native service mesh approaches like this Istio thing (NetflixOSS Zuul+Eureka+Ribbon or Linkerd are alternatives) are just decentralized gateways and proxies, possibly with a console/management appliance that makes it easy to propagate changes out across a subset of your microservices. This has the benefit of allowing you to default to decentralized freedom for your various microservices but for areas where you want administrative control over policy over a set of them , you don't have to go in and tweak 15 different configs. NetflixOSS really pioneered this pattern. Netflix managed to use things like Cassandra and Zuul hot-deploy filters as the means to updated routing/health/balancing configs across their fleet of microservices. There are alternative ways to handle this of course - Hashicorp's Consul piggybacks DNS and expects your client to figure things out via their REST API or DNS queries. There are also things like RabbitMQ or a REST-polling mechanism to propagate config changes perhaps, as not everyone wants Cassandra. New frameworks like Istio or Linkerd are further alternatives. We're spoiled for choice, better or worse..