Architecting Microservices for Agentic AI Integration

Agents don’t just “call APIs”—they plan, retry, chain, and orchestrate across services. That changes how we design microservices, boundaries, workflows, and ops. This talk lays out a practical architecture playbook: move from request/response thinking to event-driven flows; use sagas/outbox for correctness; enforce circuit breakers/bulkheads for blast-radius control; shape service boundaries around domains and agent tasks; and wire in tracing, versioning, and deprecation for long-lived agents. You’ll leave with patterns, guardrails, and KPIs to integrate agents without breaking prod.

What is Agentic AI in Microservices

Agents plan, retry, chain services → need deterministic, idempotent APIs. Services must be tool-callable (stable operationId, strict schemas). Systems must survive retry storms + fan-out. Why Monoliths & Non-Event Systems Fail

Latency and tight coupling collapse under agent retries. No event history → agents can’t re-plan. Failures amplify without bulkheads/circuit breakers. Ops teams can’t see human vs agent traffic. Core Patterns for Agent-Friendly Systems

Event-driven flows: decouple, replay-safe. Saga/outbox: long workflows with compensations, reliable events. Circuit breakers/bulkheads: contain failure, reduce blast radius. Service mesh/sidecars: centralize retries, telemetry, policies. Designing Service Boundaries

Boundaries around tasks/domains (Orders, Claims, Appointments). Expose task APIs (ReserveInventory, ScheduleAppointment). Responses = reason codes + next actions, not just raw data. Avoid polymorphism; keep contracts predictable. Integrating Agent Frameworks

Tool calling: operationId as tool name; strict inputs/outputs. Supervisor/planner patterns: policy checks between steps. Async jobs: job IDs, progress endpoints, webhooks. Safety: least privilege, quotas, payload validation. Infrastructure & Operations

Observability: OpenTelemetry, x-agent-run-id, dashboards for retries & success rates. Versioning: SemVer, multi-version routing, Deprecation/Sunset headers. Resilience: autoscale on retry rate; degrade to read-only mode; run failover drills. Takeaways

Design APIs for determinism, idempotency, and tool-callability. Use event-driven + saga/outbox for consistency. Contain failures with circuit breakers, bulkheads, and meshes. Make service boundaries task-focused for agent workflows. Separate and monitor agent vs human traffic. Build lifecycle discipline: versioning, deprecation, multi-version gateways.