The world of software development is in a constant state of evolution. We moved from giant, monolithic applications to finely-grained microservices, chasing scalability, resilience, and independent deployment. But as business processes become more complex and AI integration becomes the norm, a new architectural paradigm is emerging. It’s time to look beyond microservices to the next logical step: Agentic Services.
While microservices excel at breaking down applications into single-function components, agentic services focus on encapsulating entire goal-oriented business workflows. Let's explore the key differences and understand how this evolution is changing the way we build and consume software.
Microservices architecture has been a dominant force for good reason. It allows teams to build, deploy, and scale individual components of a larger application independently. A typical e-commerce platform might have microservices for user authentication, product catalog, shopping cart, and payment processing.
Benefits:
However, this granularity comes at a cost. Developers often find themselves wrestling with a complex web of inter-service communication, service discovery, distributed data management, and orchestration logic. The application's core business process becomes fragmented across dozens of API calls, making it brittle and hard to manage.
An Agentic Service isn't just a small piece of code; it's an autonomous, intelligent component designed to achieve a high-level business goal. Think of it less as a single tool and more as a skilled digital worker that can plan, execute, and manage a multi-step process from start to finish.
Instead of calling separate microservices to verify-identity, check-background, and approve-documents, you invoke a single agentic service: kyc.do. This service autonomously coordinates all the necessary steps, tools, and even human-in-the-loop interventions to accomplish the "Know Your Customer" workflow.
This is the core of Services-as-Software—transforming a complex process into a simple, consumable software product.
| Feature | Microservice | Agentic Service |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Single, discrete function (e.g., charge-card). | Entire business workflow (e.g., process-return). |
| Intelligence | Reactive and typically stateless. Executes a defined task. | Proactive and stateful. Can plan and orchestrate tasks to achieve a goal. |
| Communication | Requires a "chatty" network of many API calls to complete a process. | Invoked with a single API call representing a high-level objective. |
| State Management | State is externalized or managed by the calling application. | Manages its own state over long-running, asynchronous operations. |
| Definition | Traditional application code. | Defined as an Agentic Workflow, turning Business-as-Code. |
| Example | send-email | onboard-new-employee |
Agentic services don't necessarily replace microservices. Instead, they act as a higher-level abstraction, capable of orchestrating microservices, third-party APIs, and AI models to deliver a complete business outcome.
As organizations adopt this powerful new model, a fundamental question arises: How do you find, manage, and securely consume these high-level services?
This is where services.do becomes your central nervous system. It is the Unified Service Registry designed specifically for the agentic era.
services.do provides the essential infrastructure to:
Integrating a complex business process becomes as simple as a few lines of code. Using our SDK, you can dynamically discover and consume services without needing to understand their internal orchestration.
import { Do } from '@do-inc/sdk';
// Initialize the .do client
const बिंदु = new Do(process.env.DO_API_KEY);
// List all available services in the registry
const services = await बिंदु.services.list();
console.log(services);
// {
// "data": [
// { "id": "svc_123", "name": "kyc.do", ... },
// { "id": "svc_456", "name": "geocode.do", ... }
// ],
// ...
// }
On the .do platform, there's a clear distinction that enables this a new paradigm:
Once a workflow is deployed, it's automatically registered in services.do, instantly becoming a composable building block for your entire organization.
Microservices taught us to break things down. Agentic services teach us how to intelligently put them back together to achieve meaningful business outcomes. They represent a shift from building functions to composing capabilities.
By abstracting away the immense complexity of modern business processes behind a simple API, managed through a unified service registry, you empower your developers to build faster, innovate more freely, and focus on what truly matters: delivering value to your customers.
Ready to transform your business logic into discoverable, manageable, and consumable Services-as-Software? Discover how services.do can become your Unified Service Registry.