# Integration fabric

Author: Murali Sid (https://linkedin.com/in/muralisid)
Source: https://www.agenticarchitectureskills.com/library/layers/r03-integration-fabric
Published: 2026-09-18
Updated: 2026-09-18
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Cite as: Murali Sid. Integration fabric. Agentic Architecture Skills. https://www.agenticarchitectureskills.com/library/layers/r03-integration-fabric

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Status: complete (published 2026-08-19). Scope was finalized at kickoff with maintainer POV; see findings.md and sources.md.

## Scope inventory (v0) [#scope-inventory-v0]

* **Current estate**: SOA and ESB heritage, API management, EDI and B2B, iPaaS, event backbone, workflow and BPM engines, RPA estate, legacy adapters (mainframe, file and batch)
* **Agent-era**: MCP tool layer and MCP gateways (distinct from LLM gateways), tool registries and connector catalogs, agent-to-agent protocols and cross-enterprise federation, the RPA-to-agent migration path
* **Safe action**: OAuth on-behalf-of and token exchange, idempotency and compensation (saga) patterns for agent-initiated actions, human-approval workflow integration, rate limiting
* **Patterns**: experience/process/system API layering, event-driven agent triggers, durable long-running orchestration

## Challenged-default candidates [#challenged-default-candidates]

MCP gateway products vs extending existing API gateways; iPaaS agent connectors vs governed APIs; RPA replacement urgency vs coexistence. Each track proposes its final list at kickoff.

## Files [#files]

`findings.md` and `sources.md` carry this track's research. The scoping brief and the vendor map were archived on 2026-08-23 (see `archive/`, decision D038).