The late 2000s to early 2010s marked the emergence of cloud computing. AWS and Google Cloud made on-demand compute available at scale.

The hardware and infrastructure assumptions shifted:

• ephemeral instances became the norm
• horizontal scaling became cheaper
• infrastructure-as-code tools appeared and matured
• instance and network failures now considered expected, not exceptional

At the same time, communication protocols and platforms stabilized around clear leaders:

• HTTP as the universal transport
• JSON as the universal data language
• REST / gRPC as dominant API styles
• Linux as the default server OS

This convergence reduced the need for protocol mediation and heavy integration layers — some of the reasons ESBs were invented. The switch from SOA was not driven only by its limitations, but also by changes in technology.