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Internal and External Agent

Every agent in WSO2 Agent Manager is one of two types, chosen when it's created and not changeable afterward: Platform-Hosted (internal) or Externally-Hosted (external).

Platform-Hosted Agents​

A Platform-Hosted agent's full lifecycle is owned by Agent Manager. The platform builds it from a source repository (or a published Agent Kind), deploys it to each environment in its project's deployment pipeline, and can promote, roll back, or suspend it (see Agent and Agent Life Cycle).

Because the platform controls the running pod, it can inject configuration directly into it. LLM provider credentials, MCP proxy connection details, and its AgentID credential all appear as environment variables the agent code reads at runtime, with no manual wiring required.

Externally-Hosted Agents​

An Externally-Hosted agent already runs somewhere outside Agent Manager. It can be locally, on your own infrastructure, or in a third-party cloud. Agent Manager doesn't build, deploy, promote, or suspend it and registering one only gives the platform a record to attach observability and governance to.

The practical differences that follow from this:

  • No deploy or promote step. There's nothing for the platform to deploy, so AgentID credential provisioning for every environment in the organization begins as soon as the agent is registered, rather than being tied to a deploy.
  • You wire configuration in yourself. Since there's no pod to inject into, the platform instead hands you connection details to configure — an API key and OTel endpoint for instrumentation, and endpoint URLs plus API keys for any LLM Service Provider or MCP Proxy the agent uses.
  • Observability requires instrumenting it. No traces appear until the agent is connected via the amp-instrumentation package (or the manual init_otel() path) — see AMP Instrumentation.

Where the Distinction Shows Up​

Both agent types share the same organization-level resources (LLM providers, MCP proxies, gateways) and the same governance model (RBAC, evaluation, AgentID). What the type changes is how much of the agent's operation the platform runs for you

For a Platform-Hosted agent, all of it happens inside Agent Manager: you point it at a source repository and the platform builds the image, provisions the workload into the project's namespace, deploys it to each environment in the deployment pipeline, and handles promotion, rollback, and suspension from the same place. There is no separate CI system, registry, or deployment tooling to operate. For an Externally-Hosted agent none of that applies, you own the build and the deployment.

Platform-Hosted agents are wired automatically, since the platform controls the pod and injects credentials and endpoints as environment variables. Externally-Hosted agents are wired manually where the platform hands you the connection details and you configure them into wherever the agent runs.

Choose Platform-Hosted when you want the platform to operate the agent end to end, and Externally-Hosted when the agent must run somewhere you already control and you only need Agent Manager for governance and observability over it.