I was exposed to the idea of reverse ETL recently. The essence of the paradigm is to have a workflow that retrieves data from your SaaS APIs, transforms and enriches it, and then ingests this data into other SaaS providers in order to automate various backend workflows.
In a way it’s similar to a gateway in that you are composing different backend targets. Although it might just be a marketing neologism describing middleware.
Traditional ETL tools focused on getting data out of services and into a few places like a relational DB, S3, or some other such aggregated storage so they were read-only from services and read/write to DBs.
Reverse ETL is marketing to differentiate to the customer that you're pushing data into services as well, so that it's read/write to all.
Of course the concept is amusing to someone talking about ETL, but the market moved at some point to refer to the first functionality as ETL and so this is just a change to differentiate.
Np! Wasn't intended as a slight. We all come into new things the way we do, rarely via the textbook definition (which typically doesn't even exist when we're first doing it!).
In a way it’s similar to a gateway in that you are composing different backend targets. Although it might just be a marketing neologism describing middleware.