Rise of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA gained traction as an architectural style focused on developing applications by composing loosely coupled, reusable services. While not a direct precursor to API Gateways, it laid the philosophical groundwork for distributed systems.

Significance

SOA introduced the concept of services and their interfaces, making the eventual need for a centralized management point more apparent, though ESBs were the primary integration pattern at this stage.