From Microservices to Agents: The Next Evolution of Distributed Systems
InfoQ, Monday, October 19th, 2026
Agentic AI shifts distributed systems from orchestrating services to orchestrating runtime decisions, which brings new failure modes.
Part of InfoQ's Agentic AI Architecture series, this article compares microservices, which split up functionality behind fixed APIs, with agentic systems that split up decisions made at runtime.
Agents bring non-deterministic execution paths driven by context, reasoning and tool selection, making decision quality a reliability concern alongside latency and availability.
The author warns that production failures often show up as a quiet decline in reasoning quality rather than explicit errors.
He recommends bounded autonomy, evaluation loops and deterministic fallback paths.