# Agent and Agent Life Cycle

An Agent is the core workload in WSO2 Agent Manager. A registered AI agent that belongs to a [project](/agent-manager/docs/next/concepts/project/.md), optionally builds and deploys through the platform, and is governed and observed once it's running.

## What Makes Up an Agent[​](#what-makes-up-an-agent "Direct link to What Makes Up an Agent")

An agent's definition combines several pieces, each independently configurable:

* **Type** — whether the agent is [Platform-Hosted or Externally-Hosted](/agent-manager/docs/next/concepts/internal-and-external-agent/.md), and its language/runtime.
* **Provisioning** — for platform-hosted agents, the source repository, branch, and path the platform builds from.
* **Build** — the build strategy: `buildpack` (language + start command, e.g. Python) or `docker` (a `Dockerfile` in the repository).
* **Configurations** — runtime settings: auto-instrumentation, environment variables, API key / OAuth security, CORS, and resilience timeouts.
* **Kind** — optionally, an agent can be created from a published [Agent Kind](/agent-manager/docs/next/concepts/agent-kind-and-catalog/.md) rather than a raw repository.

## Life Cycle Actions[​](#life-cycle-actions "Direct link to Life Cycle Actions")

Moving an agent from registered to running in production is a sequence of distinct, separately-permissioned actions rather than one deploy step:

| Action                  | Permission                        | What it does                                                                                                                                        |
| ----------------------- | --------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Create                  | `amp:agent:create`                | Registers the agent in a project.                                                                                                                   |
| Build                   | `amp:agent:build`                 | Builds a deployable artifact from the agent's source (platform-hosted only).                                                                        |
| Deploy (non-production) | `amp:agent:deploy-non-production` | Deploys a built artifact to a non-production [environment](/agent-manager/docs/next/concepts/environment/.md).                                      |
| Deploy (production)     | `amp:agent:deploy-production`     | Deploys to a production environment — a separate permission from non-production deploys.                                                            |
| Promote                 | `amp:agent:promote`               | Moves a deployed version to the next environment in the project's [deployment pipeline](/agent-manager/docs/next/concepts/deployment-pipeline/.md). |
| Rollback                | `amp:agent:rollback`              | Reverts an environment to a previously deployed version.                                                                                            |
| Suspend                 | `amp:agent:suspend`               | Stops a deployed agent without deleting it.                                                                                                         |

Splitting production deploys from non-production ones means someone can be trusted to push to staging without being trusted to push straight to production — the same separation the [deployment pipeline](/agent-manager/docs/next/concepts/deployment-pipeline/.md) enforces at the environment level.

## Deployment Status Per Environment[​](#deployment-status-per-environment "Direct link to Deployment Status Per Environment")

An agent's deployment status is tracked independently for each environment it targets, not as one global state for the agent. Each environment reports one of five states:

| Status         | Meaning                                                                                                                       |
| -------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `active`       | Deployed and able to serve traffic.                                                                                           |
| `in-progress`  | A deployment is under way — either still rolling out, or applied but with pods that haven't passed their readiness probe yet. |
| `failed`       | The deployment did not come up successfully.                                                                                  |
| `not-deployed` | The agent has never been deployed to this environment.                                                                        |
| `suspended`    | Previously deployed, then stopped by the suspend action.                                                                      |

The distinction between `in-progress` and `active` matters in practice, an agent whose configuration has been applied but whose container is still booting is reported as `in-progress` rather than `active`, so callers don't invoke it and receive a `503`.