Linux Foundation takes over Solo.io’s open-source Agentgateway project – News

Cloud-native application networking startup Solo.io Inc. has donated its open-source Agentgateway project to the Linux Foundation, ensuring its development will proceed under neutral governance for the foreseeable future.

The Agentgateway project is an open-source and artificial intelligence-native proxy that’s designed to optimize connectivity, security and observability for agentic AI environments. The project has been optimized specifically for AI agents, building on the foundation of earlier gateways, such as Solo.io’s Gloo Gateway or the open-source Envoy project, which were designed for traditional applications and simplify how they access application programming interfaces and communicate with other services.

When it comes to AI agents, they can benefit from having a dedicated gateway, because most existing tools were designed before AI became so popular. As such, most gateways struggle to support many of the most popular AI protocols in use today without major changes in architecture.

The Linux Foundation said Agentgateway is a unified data plane that has been built from the ground up to support AI agents specifically. It’s designed to govern and secure agent-to-agent, agent-to-tool and agent-to-large language model communications.

It’s a useful tool for agentic AI developers, because in order to deploy AI agents that can efficiently perform tasks on behalf of humans without supervision, they need to support numerous rapidly evolving protocols. Agentgateway comes with support for multiple protocols baked in, including the Linux Foundation-hosted Agent2Agent Protocol, which was first developed by Google and helps to enable two or more specialized agents to cooperate on complex tasks.

That can be very useful in certain situations. For instance, if a general-purpose agent struggles to process a prompt, it can use the A2A protocol to send that request to another agent that’s more suitable for processing it.

Agentgateway also supports the popular Model Context Protocol, which is another open-source standard created by Anthropic PBC. MCP, as it’s known, aims to standardize how AI agents connect and share data with external tools and systems, acting like a universal connector, so those agents can access and use various data sources. The idea with MCP is to eliminate the challenges of information silos and the need for custom integrations.

Solo.io Chief Executive Idit Levine said existing API gateways weren’t designed for the immense networking demands of agentic AI architectures and cannot adapt quickly enough, hence the need for a dedicated gateway. “We built Agentgateway from the ground up to handle the protocols, patterns, and scale required for agentic infrastructure, from A2A and MCP to LLM provider APIs and high-volume inferencing,” Levine said. “Agentgateway is the connective tissue for the next generation of intelligent systems.”

Her company has gotten a lot of support for the idea. Although it only launched Agentgateway in April, organizations such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Microsoft Corp., Red Hat, Akamai Technologies Inc. and others have already thrown their weight behind it as contributors.

Given the widespread support, it makes sense for Solo.io to want to enshrine Agentgateway’s open-source nature. The Linux Foundation will act as a neutral steward of the project and ensure it remains not tied to single providers, developed by the community in a collaborative way.

Akamai Senior Vice President of Cloud Technology Jon Alexander said agentic AI requires a purpose-built infrastructure layer that rethinks compute, storage and data movement, so it doesn’t make sense to retrofit existing systems. Instead, it’s better to start anew, and he believes Agentgateway represents a solid step in that direction. “The Linux Foundation will ensure open-source and community can drive the adoption and longevity that AI infrastructure requires,” he said.

Image: Agentgateway