Control Plane for Agent Fleet
A Discussion with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Soon we will have thousands, maybe millions of agents in every enterprise. At this point the control plane for an agent fleet, or agent ecosystem, will be the next clear and present enterprise architecture challenge. Kubernetes, microservices, identity, security, and observability, all at-scale - are now the required operating model for enterprise agents.
1/ Enterprise agents are not personal agents.
We draw a clear line between laptop-bound agents that run under a user’s identity and enterprise agents that must be secure, observable, operable, reliable, and manageable like any other enterprise application.
2/ Microservices become micro-agents.
Our core argument is that agents should be packaged as smart microservices in containers, which lets enterprises use proven cloud-native patterns for deployment, scaling, security, and operations rather than inventing an entirely new runtime model.
3/ Fleets require a real control plane.
We frame the challenge as managing thousands or even millions of agents, organized into observer, goal-oriented, and task-oriented roles, with Kubernetes serving as the deployment and coordination substrate for fleets, and even fleets of fleets.
4/ The control plane for agent fleets is therefore much broader than orchestration alone.
It is about Kubernetes, microservices, security, identity, state, communication fabric, trust, and the surrounding services that make agents usable in production.
5/ This is an important and urgent challenge that we need to address!
We believe that the next phase of enterprise agents will depend less on whether a single agent can do something impressive, and more on whether a fleet can be governed, trusted, and run as part of the operating model.
Special thanks to:
Cloud Native Community Groups https://community.cncf.io/
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation @cncf
Josh Halley, Principal Architect at Cisco Systems
and to all of the virtual participants.
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