The Orchestrator

Three standards carry most of the weight. The Model Context Protocol — the tool layer from Chapter 5 — and the Agent2Agent protocol — the delegation layer Chapter 17 takes apart — are both governed by the Linux Foundation, and A2A passed one hundred fifty supporting organizations in its first year, with integrations across Google, Microsoft, and AWS platforms.¹² The Agent Skills specification, covered in Chapter 6, is Anthropic’s open standard for procedural knowledge. None of the three is finished, and none guarantees interoperable behavior by itself, but they are where tool portability, task delegation, and skill reuse are being standardized, and an orchestrator choosing infrastructure should prefer equipment that speaks them. Open source and open standards are how this layer avoids the fate of every proprietary integration era: an ecosystem where every tool only works with its own siblings.