AI agents bring new demands to the infrastructure connecting them to models, tools, and data. Each agent can have its own permissions and state, and spend much of its time asleep before waking up to make another request. Supporting that behavior at scale changes how the network routes traffic, loads policies, and manages resources.
In this episode of Alexa’s Input (AI), I sit down with Yan Avlasov, Staff Software Engineer at Google and a senior maintainer of Envoy, to talk about building the networking stack for agents.
We get into why Google is building on Envoy, what changes between serving inference and supporting agents, and why enforcing policies for individual agents requires a more dynamic control plane. Yan also shares what he’s seeing from AI-powered security scanning, including how models combine subtle bugs into serious vulnerabilities and why fixing them can mean changing behavior that production systems have relied on for years.
From the episode:
- Model selection, cost controls, and fallback across providers
- Loading policies dynamically as agent traffic changes
- Managing personalized state and agents that suspend and resume
- Where Model Context Protocol (MCP) fits alongside the protocols agents already use
- Semantic routing and choosing models based on what a request needs
- Security findings involving policy enforcement, path normalization, and JSON parsing
- The engineering work and cost of making security scanning continuous
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:12 Welcome, Yan
02:30 How AI is changing Google
07:56 Yan’s networking background
10:00 New networking layers for agents
13:11 AI gateways, cost controls, and fallback
16:38 Why Google builds on Envoy
22:21 Per-agent policies and a dynamic control plane
26:56 Inference versus stateful agents
31:58 Project Substrate: running agents at scale
33:31 MCP and the other protocols agents use
37:32 Semantic routing and model costs
40:40 AI security scanning and the work of fixing bugs
43:55 Policy timing, path normalization, and JSON
47:11 Making security scanning continuous
50:40 What’s next for agentic networking
53:32 Closing
Read the episode article on Substack
Watch on YouTube
