Contract-Driven Multi-Agent Incident Response for Cloud-Native Platforms

Cloud-native incident response increasingly spans Kubernetes clusters, API gateways, vector stores, observability backends, model endpoints, and compliance repositories. Human responders need fast evidence, but unbounded automation can make incidents worse by invoking unsafe tools, leaking sensitive context, or applying stale runbook steps. This paper proposes Contract-Driven Multi-Agent Incident Response (CD-MAIR), a synthetic architecture in which specialized response agents negotiate typed tool contracts before they inspect systems, retrieve evidence, update runbooks, or shift workloads across cloud providers. CD-MAIR combines governed pipeline agents, secure API-gateway intents, critic-guided documentation maintenance, distributed retrieval-augmented generation, model-context-protocol contracts, cross-cloud workload placement, and privacy-preserving evidence views. It extends Policy-Verified Agentic DataOps for Regulated Multi-Cloud Analytics with incident-specific action verification, extends Retrieval-Grounded Documentation Agents for Enterprise Compliance Evidence with live runbook repair, and extends Cross-Cloud LLMOps Scheduler for Privacy-Budgeted RAG and Inference with incident-aware route selection. In a simulated benchmark over cloud-native outages, CD-MAIR reduces mean time to qualified mitigation from 41.8 to 24.6 minutes, improves evidence-supported action rate from 0.73 to 0.92, and eliminates unauthorized tool invocations under the benchmark policy.