The AI hype cycle has us all building "agents", autonomous little bots that can code, write, or scrape the web. But if you look closely at how most of these agents are architected today, you'll see a familiar ghost from the past: the Monolith.
Right now, most AI agents are isolated black boxes. They don't talk to each other, they don't trust each other, and they certainly don't scale well together. In a recent episode of the Stack Overflow Podcast, Guillaume De Saint Marc (VP of Engineering at Outshift by Cisco) laid out a compelling vision for the future: we need to stop treating agents like standalone magic tricks and start treating them like microservices.
Here is why your next AI project needs a microservices mindset, and how the industry is trying to build the "Internet of Agents" to make it happen.
The "Silo" Problem in Agentic AI
Imagine if every microservice in your Kubernetes cluster spoke a different language and had no way to discover its neighbours. That is the current state of AI. You have a "Researcher" agent built with LangChain, a "Coder" agent using a custom OpenAI wrapper, and a "Reviewer" agent on a completely different stack. Getting them to collaborate is a nightmare of custom glue code and brittle integrations.
Guillaume argues that to build truly scalable multi-agent systems (MAS), we need to solve the same infrastructure problems we solved for cloud-native apps:
- Discovery: How does Agent A know Agent B exists and what it can do?
- Identity: How can Agent A trust that Agent B is who it says it is?
- Communication: What protocol do they use to exchange complex context, not just JSON text?
- Observability: When the whole workflow breaks, how do you trace the error across five different agents?
The Solution: The "Internet of Agents" (AGNTCY)
This isn't just theory. The podcast highlights AGNTCY (pronounced "agency"), an open-source collective backed by Cisco, LangChain, Galileo, and others. Their goal is to build the foundational layer that lets specialized agents collaborate across platforms—effectively an "Internet of Agents".
The framework proposes a standardized stack that mirrors the microservices world:
- Open Agent Schema Framework (OASF): A standard way to describe an agent's capabilities so others can discover it (think Swagger/OpenAPI for agents).
- Agent Identity: Cryptographically verifiable identity so agents can work securely across organizational boundaries.
- Secure Messaging (SLIM): A "Secure Low-latency Interactive Messaging" protocol that handles the heavy lifting of agent-to-agent communication.
- Observability: End-to-end tracing to debug complex multi-agent workflows.
Why This Matters for Developers
If you are a developer building AI tools, this shift is critical. Instead of building one massive "god agent" that tries to do everything (and fails at most of it), you can build specialized, high-performing agents that plug into a larger network. You could build the world's best "Python Debugger Agent" and let it be discovered and used by a "Product Manager Agent" built by someone else.
This modular approach prevents vendor lock-in and allows for a "best-of-breed" architecture. You don't have to wait for OpenAI or Google to release the perfect end-to-end solution; you can stitch together the best open-source agents into a workflow that actually works.
Takeaway
The era of the "do-it-all" chatbot is fading. The future belongs to specialized, interoperable agents that work together. As Guillaume notes, we need to move from "bespoke" agent building to a standardized industrial approach.
If you want to dive deeper into the architecture of this new "Internet of Agents," check out the full conversation on the Stack Overflow Podcast.
Here's a video from the Cisco team that dives further into the technical details of the AGNTCY project and how to actually implement these microservice-like patterns for your agents.