Agent Mesh Runtime - Service Networking with Istio + NATS

🕸️ Agent Mesh Runtime (Service Networking)

Goal: Upgrade agent-mesh with production-grade service networking and zero-trust security.

Service Mesh Components

1. Istio Integration

Deploy with Istio for:

• Service discovery
• Traffic management
• Load balancing
• Circuit breaking
• Retry logic
• Timeout handling
• Observability

2. NATS Messaging

Integrate NATS for:

• Pub/sub messaging
• Request/reply patterns
• Queue groups
• Stream processing
• JetStream persistence
• At-least-once delivery

3. Zero-Trust Security

OPA Integration

• Policy enforcement at mesh level
• Authorization decisions
• Access control

SPIFFE/SPIRE

• Service identity framework
• Mutual TLS (mTLS)
• Identity attestation
• Certificate rotation
• Trust domains

4. Gateway Integration

Integrate agent-router with Portkey-AI Gateway:

• Multi-LLM load balancing
• Provider fallbacks
• Cost optimization
• Latency routing
• A/B testing

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│         Istio Service Mesh          │
│  ┌──────────┐      ┌──────────┐   │
│  │ Agent A  │◄────►│ Agent B  │   │
│  └────┬─────┘      └────┬─────┘   │
│       │                 │          │
│  ┌────▼─────────────────▼─────┐   │
│  │      NATS Message Bus      │   │
│  └────────────┬───────────────┘   │
│               │                    │
│  ┌────────────▼───────────────┐   │
│  │    OPA Policy Engine       │   │
│  └────────────┬───────────────┘   │
│               │                    │
│  ┌────────────▼───────────────┐   │
│  │  SPIFFE Identity Provider  │   │
│  └────────────────────────────┘   │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘
              │
              ▼
      Portkey-AI Gateway

Extended Features

• Service-to-service encryption
• Traffic policies
• Canary deployments
• Blue-green deployments
• Chaos engineering support
• Distributed tracing
• Metrics collection

Implementation Tasks

• Deploy Istio service mesh
• Integrate NATS messaging
• Set up SPIFFE/SPIRE
• Configure OPA policies
• Integrate Portkey-AI Gateway
• Add mTLS between services
• Configure traffic management
• Add observability hooks
• Build deployment patterns

Expected Result

Production-grade service mesh with zero-trust security and intelligent routing.

Priority

High - Core infrastructure

Phase

Phase 4 - Agent mesh runtime