[einrealist]

Thank you for your opinion and explanation.

As long as proxies remain transparent to services, I see no problem. It becomes a problem, when proxies are getting smarter in terms of providing cross cutting features, like routing on payload level (not speaking of message headers) or do authentication and authorization on a per-resource level. That puts constraints on how services are built in this particular environment.

But I see the logic behind approaches, developed by Netflix, and now Istio. If you have a lot of services, orchestration and more central communication management is probably a good way to govern, if the constraints (described above) are accepted and services still have the ability to opt out and pursue a different strategy.

The old SOA world was driven by governance. This was a result of the general engineering methodologies and mindsets of this time. Still, API Gateways / smarter proxies / etc. could bring that back...

[parasubvert]

The commercial products in this space (Apigee, Layer 7, MuleSoft and the like) seem to have learned their lessons over the years, but we'll see. Things like Eureka require RESTful discovery protocols that aren't exactly standards, for example, and rely on well-written client libraries.