Why is introducing message queues as an intermediary layer more secure than the agents connecting to the data stores directly? Or is your point that this reduces overhead because you only need a single secured connection per data store?
Hi there! Good question. There’s a few points rolled into this topic when I use the word “secure”.
1) Architecture governance. Mature companies won’t allow integration with enterprise systems unless an interface façade is present. Many distributed system operate in an asynchronous manner and so message queues are the preferred option.
2) Human in the Loop (HITL). Agentic systems need the ability to stop when they cannot continue and a failsafe on their reasoning is present. Queues “secure” the business process the Agent is supporting by provided a dead letter queue that holds actions until a user has dealt with the issue halting the Agent.
3) Standardisation. Using a queue tool allows an Agent to communicate with any endpoint very quickly as content-based routing dictates the integration exchange. That means I build the concrete interface to the queue architecture once, but can connect to many systems that publish and subscribe to the queue.
Why is introducing message queues as an intermediary layer more secure than the agents connecting to the data stores directly? Or is your point that this reduces overhead because you only need a single secured connection per data store?
Hi there! Good question. There’s a few points rolled into this topic when I use the word “secure”.
1) Architecture governance. Mature companies won’t allow integration with enterprise systems unless an interface façade is present. Many distributed system operate in an asynchronous manner and so message queues are the preferred option.
2) Human in the Loop (HITL). Agentic systems need the ability to stop when they cannot continue and a failsafe on their reasoning is present. Queues “secure” the business process the Agent is supporting by provided a dead letter queue that holds actions until a user has dealt with the issue halting the Agent.
3) Standardisation. Using a queue tool allows an Agent to communicate with any endpoint very quickly as content-based routing dictates the integration exchange. That means I build the concrete interface to the queue architecture once, but can connect to many systems that publish and subscribe to the queue.
Hope this answers your question.
Good arguments, thanks!