cloud platform architects

Abstract: Large language model applications are increasingly being organized as tool-using and multi-agent workflows rather than as isolated chat interfaces. This perspective paper examines the architectural problem that follows from that shift: agents may reason, invoke tools, and delegate work, but dependable deployment still requires interoperability across frameworks, runtimes, data boundaries, and organizational control domains. We study this problem through the lens of the \emph{Internet of Agentics} (IoA), an emerging service-computing view in which heterogeneous agents are treated as governable service participants rather than only as stand-alone model endpoints. The paper organizes the landscape as a three-layer progression: from today's fragmented agent ecosystem, to interoperable agents, and ultimately to trustworthy and governable autonomy. First, it examines the protocol stack centered on the Agentic AI Foundation, including MCP for agent--tool interaction; A2A for agent--agent coordination; AGENTS.md and Skills-style procedural manifests; and discovery, transport, and trust mechanisms such as AGNTCY and SLIM. Second, it reviews the systems abstractions that make agents deployable as service components, including logical agent architectures, orchestration patterns, gateways, registries, runtime control loops, and hardware-aware inference infrastructure. Third, it situates these developments within services computing, arguing that agentic systems reinterpret classical concerns from SOA and microservices---discovery, composition, governance, pricing, and trust---at the level of cognitive capabilities rather than deterministic functions.

Abstract: Organizations increasingly encode operational procedures as multi-step agent skills, here called Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), that must be traceable, auditable, reproducible, access-controlled, and bounded in time and cost, requirements that regulated sectors make mandatory. Yet AOPs are typically kept as coarse-grained files, in which steps bundle actions, copied procedures drift apart, any step may reach any tool, and refactoring goes unchecked. We present Functional Agent Operating Procedures (FAOP), a formal theory that brings database-grade discipline to AI agent workflows. FAOP recasts each workflow as a typed function over scoped state and subjects an entire library to four progressive normal forms: Decomposed (FNF-1) splits a workflow into atomic steps, Typed (FNF-2) makes its data flow explicit and type-checked, Factored (FNF-3) gives each shared procedure a single canonical definition so a change propagates instead of drifting, and Scoped (FNF-4) confines every step to least-privilege tool access. Once normalized, every atomic step is a separate entity with a declared contract and can be type-checked, scope-confined, bounded, tested, traced, and audited on its own. A FAOP algebra of provably sound equalities turns refactoring and parallelization into compiler rewrites; orthogonal extensions add verified termination (+V), optimization (+O), and time and cost bounds (+B); and an architectural-level classifier (0-3) determines whether a workflow needs AI at all. Together, these make integrity, isolation, typing, termination, cost, and optimization compile-time concerns across the whole library, not runtime hopes. We implement the theory in SkillBase, an AOP management system (what PostgreSQL is to data, SkillBase is to AOPs), together with a separate executor that enforces these guarantees at run time. A worked financial workflow illustrates the approach end to end.