The Agentic Stack: What Comes After Containers and Serverless
Why the request-response stack fails for autonomous agent workloads, and what new infrastructure primitives are emerging to take its place.
Current infrastructure was designed for applications that respond to requests. Containers, serverless, orchestration — all built for workloads that scale with traffic and shut down when idle.
Agentic systems break this model. They run continuously, maintain state across long workflows, and coordinate autonomously with other agents. These aren’t request-response applications — they’re thinking systems that happen to use infrastructure.
New primitives will emerge because the current stack creates too much friction. Just as containers emerged when virtualisation couldn’t handle microservices, agentic infrastructure will emerge when current patterns prove inadequate.
This talk explores:
- Why stateless, reactive patterns fail for autonomous agent workloads
- The primitives emerging: persistent contexts, coordination layers, multi-agent state management
- Where current infrastructure works for agents — and where it completely fails
- Predictions for infrastructure evolution over the next two years
Organisations building agentic systems today are discovering these gaps firsthand. Understanding what’s coming helps avoid building on infrastructure that won’t support where this is heading.