Distributed Orchestration Control Plane
Routing, backpressure, and safe-rollout controls for distributed agents. Canary deploys, rollback on metric breach, tenant isolation enforced at the orchestration plane.
Why
- Agents behave like distributed actors. Without orchestration you get uncontrolled retries, unclear dependencies, and unsafe rollouts.
What
- A workflow/orchestration layer that: coordinates task DAGs
- routes across agent versions safely
- applies global backpressure (queue/concurrency) and budgets
- provides retry policies and compensation actions
How
- represent workflows as DAGs with explicit dependencies
- safe rollouts: canary/shadow/rollback with measurable gates
- global concurrency pools; tool-specific queues
- compensation actions for partial failures (idempotency and rollback)
Evidence
- orchestration execution history and state transitions
- rollback events tied to anomaly thresholds
- backpressure events and queue health
Failure modes
- orchestration logic embedded in agent prompts
- unbounded retries
- lack of idempotency leading to duplicate side effects
- Agent Deadlock: Two agents waiting on each other for inputs (A waits for B, B waits for A).
Mitigation: The Orchestrator must implement a "cycle detection" or "step timeout" watchdog that terminates the DAG if progress stalls. Architect’s Note - Macro control plane responsibilities Control 15 defines orchestration-level governance (queue depth, concurrency, backpressure, scheduling, retries/backoff). It does not replace Gateway-level rate limiting and quotas (Control 07); it governs workflow execution dynamics across many calls and many agents.
NIST AI RMF alignment
C15 maps to GOVERN and MANAGE. See the framework paper for the specific subcontrol mappings.
ISO/IEC alignment
C15 maps to ISO/IEC 27001. Typical evidence: see the Evidence section above.