Jia Huang

Agent pattern lineage

Engineering ancestors of Agent design patterns.

Agent patterns look new because the model is new. Architecturally, many of them inherit older software ideas: caches, queues, pipes, workflow engines, event logs, RBAC, sagas, bulkheads, observability and MapReduce. Hover over a pattern to see the bridge.

Full mapping

Pattern → engineering ancestor → original engineering problem

28 patterns

Hover map

More engineering ancestors ↓

Distributed-systems era

Canonical distributed patterns and their Agent descendants

GoF assumed a single process. The distributed era replaced that with a different operating assumption: failure is the default, not the exception. The patterns below are the ones that made it into production handbooks, vendor APIs and platform engineering. Each one has at least one Agent-era descendant — sometimes a direct port, sometimes a reframing.

More

Ancestor catalog

This is the larger vocabulary behind the hover cards. The point is not to claim one-to-one inheritance. The point is to help an Agent architect ask: which old engineering problem is this new Agent problem secretly replaying?

Sources and further reading

  1. Microsoft Azure Architecture Center: Cache-Aside pattern
  2. Microsoft Azure Architecture Center: Pipes and Filters pattern
  3. Microsoft Azure Architecture Center: Priority Queue pattern
  4. Microsoft Azure Architecture Center: Competing Consumers pattern
  5. Microsoft Azure Architecture Center: Saga distributed transactions pattern
  6. Martin Fowler: Circuit Breaker
  7. Martin Fowler: Event Sourcing
  8. OpenTelemetry documentation
  9. Apache Airflow documentation: DAGs
  10. Temporal documentation
  11. Google Research: MapReduce
  12. PostgreSQL documentation: Routine Vacuuming
  13. NIST: Role-Based Access Controls
  14. IBM: What is ETL?
  15. Apache Lucene Core
  16. Spring Framework: IoC Container
  17. Spring Framework: Aspect Oriented Programming
  18. Spring Framework: HandlerInterceptor
  19. ISO 9001:2015 Quality management systems
  20. Linux Kernel documentation: CFS Scheduler
  21. Linux Kernel documentation: Page Tables
  22. Oracle: Java HotSpot Garbage Collection
  23. Stanford IR Book: Relevance feedback and query expansion
  24. PostgreSQL documentation: Write-Ahead Logging
  25. Google SRE Book: Postmortem Culture
  26. AWS: Elastic Load Balancing documentation
  27. Martin Fowler: Test-Driven Development
  28. GitHub Docs: Pull request reviews
  29. Apache Spark documentation
  30. NIST SP 800-115: Technical Guide to Information Security Testing and Assessment
  31. Atlassian: DevOps runbook template
  32. SEC: Internal Control over Financial Reporting rules
  33. FATF: Risk-Based Approach for the Banking Sector
  34. Kubernetes: Self-Healing
  35. Kubernetes: Namespaces
  36. Netflix Hystrix
  37. Prometheus Blackbox Exporter
  38. Pirolli and Card: Information Foraging
  39. Refactoring.Guru: Chain of Responsibility
  40. Refactoring.Guru: Command pattern