P2P vs. Broker: The Architecture Decision Defining Multi-Agent Systems

Most multi-agent systems are built on a broker. There's a coordinator that receives tasks, dispatches them to worker agents, and collects results. It's a natural architecture. It mirrors how humans organize teams. It's easy to reason about. It's also a bottleneck that gets worse as your fleet grows. This post breaks down when broker architectures work, when they fail, and what a peer-to-peer alternative actually looks like in production. The Broker Model: Strengths and Limits A broker-based syst