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Ideation Brief — Agentic Runtime Research Phase

Status: Proposed (this brief is itself under review — feedback welcome on the PR). Working group: Cloud Foundry Agentic Runtime

Why this phase exists

The Agentic Runtime Working Group is new, and the design space — running AI agents and LLM-powered workloads as first-class citizens on Cloud Foundry — is broad and moving fast. Before committing to specific designs or RFCs, we want to map the landscape together: gather what the community already knows and surface prior art from the wider ecosystem. With that map in hand, the workshop can then see where Cloud Foundry's primitives help or fall short.

This repository is the home for that research. It is deliberately lightweight and open: the goal is breadth of input from anyone interested, not polished deliverables.

The four-phase roadmap

This research phase is step one of four:

  1. Capture & research (now, ~a few weeks). Contributors open pull requests with either a quick idea in ideas/ — a spark, question, or pointer, at a low bar — or a short, sourced research note in research/. We want broad, outward-looking coverage of the wider agentic ecosystem — relevant technologies, prior art, and how others solve these problems. Where Cloud Foundry fits comes later. Ideas and research link together — one research note can back several ideas — and an idea with enough research behind it can grow into a proposal.
  2. Workshop. The working group meets to read across the accumulated notes and cluster them into themes. Themes are not defined up front — they emerge from what people actually contribute.
  3. Match. Working-group members align their interests with the identified themes and form small groups around them.
  4. POC / RFC. Each theme group spins up focused work — proofs-of-concept and Cloud Foundry RFCs — feeding the platform roadmap.

We are building only what Phase 1 needs right now. Structure for themes, POCs, and RFCs will be added once the workshop has shaped it.

What to contribute in Phase 1

Look outward. Phase 1 is about understanding the wider agentic and AI ecosystem — not about cataloguing Cloud Foundry. Where Cloud Foundry's primitives help or fall short is something we want to discover at the workshop, drawn from this research, rather than assume up front.

Two ways in. Not everything needs to be a polished note. If you have a spark but no time to write it up, drop it in ideas/ — we'd rather capture it than turn it away for not being a full research note. A sourced, structured write-up belongs in research/. The scope below applies to both.

In scope — research notes that inform the design space, such as:

  • Analyses of agent frameworks, protocols, and platforms (how others solve a problem).
  • Prior art and standards — identity, sandboxing, observability, orchestration conventions.
  • How adjacent runtimes and platforms (Kubernetes, serverless, other PaaS) handle agentic workloads.
  • Surveys of the surrounding ecosystem and where it's heading.

Out of scope for now:

  • Finished solutions, designs, or RFCs — those come in Phase 4, after the workshop. A note may raise questions and point at possible directions, but its job is to inform, not to settle on a final answer.
  • Definitive Cloud Foundry gap lists. Identifying gaps is an outcome of this phase, synthesized at the workshop from the body of research — not a starting point any one contributor supplies.

What makes a good research note

  • Sourced. Link to the primary material so others can dig in.
  • Summarized. A few sentences capturing the essence — assume the reader is busy.
  • Outward-looking, with a light CF lens. The substance is the external research; add a short note on why it might matter for Cloud Foundry. A loose or speculative connection is fine — "not sure how this maps yet" is a perfectly good answer.
  • Honest about open questions. Unknowns are valuable signal for the workshop.

Each note follows a small template — see research/TEMPLATE.md. CONTRIBUTING.md explains the mechanics.

Tagging: how themes will emerge

Each note carries free-form tags in its frontmatter. At the workshop we'll use these tags to cluster notes into themes — so tagging well is how you influence the agenda.

Tags are descriptive, not prescriptive. To reduce noise, here is a non-binding starting vocabulary drawn from the working-group charter. Use these where they fit, and invent new ones where they don't:

  • identity — workload/agent identity, authn, authz
  • runtime-lifecycle — how agents are deployed, started, stopped, resumed
  • sandboxing-isolation — execution isolation, policy enforcement
  • orchestration — multi-step / multi-agent coordination
  • inter-agent-comms — agent-to-agent and agent-to-tool protocols
  • observability-governance — telemetry, audit, compliance
  • autoscaling — event-driven and scale-to-zero patterns
  • ecosystem-survey — landscape scans of tools, frameworks, vendors

These are hints, not buckets. Don't file your note into a predetermined theme — just describe it accurately and let the themes emerge.

Timeline

Specific dates (the research window length and the workshop date) are set at the working-group kickoff and announced in #ai-wg on Slack. Expect the research window to run a few weeks.

How to participate

  1. Read CONTRIBUTING.md.
  2. Add an idea or a research note using the matching template, and open a PR.
  3. Join the conversation in #ai-wg.

Feedback on this process

This brief is part of the first pull request on purpose — so the working group can shape the process before research arrives at volume. If something here doesn't serve the goal, say so on the PR.