Beyond the Service Mesh: Building a Practical Agentic Layer for Real Enterprise APIs
The Problem with Fixed Workflows Last year, I spent three months with a client trying to fix a 'simple' returns process in their e-commerce backend. We had the services—one for inventory, one for payments, and one for CRM. The problem wasn't the connectivity; we had a solid service mesh (Istio) handling retries and mTLS. The problem was the logic. Every time the business wanted to change a rule—like offering a store credit instead of a refund for high-value customers—we had to rewrite code, update three different microservices, and re-deploy a monolithic workflow orchestrator. We realized that we had spent years perfecting the 'how' of service communication (packets, latency, security) but we were still hard-coding the 'what' and 'why.' As more teams start shoving LLMs into their stack, they're finding that standard service meshes don't provide the semantic context these models need to actually do work. This is where the shift toward what peo...