GitLab Agents Explained: Foundational vs Custom vs External

Exploring GitLab Agents: Foundational, Custom & External

As organisations increasingly adopt GitOps for Kubernetes management, GitLab continues to enhance its agent ecosystem to provide flexibility and scalability for various use cases. In this article, we explore the three distinct types of GitLab agents: Foundational, Custom, and External.

Foundational Agents

Foundational agents are built-in and maintained by GitLab. They serve as the groundwork for managing clusters, offering a strong integration with GitLab’s UI, project structure, and access controls. These agents allow users to define infrastructure as code and automate continuous deployment workflows, all from within GitLab.

Custom Agents

For more specific operational needs, users can extend GitLab’s functionality through custom-built agents. These are user-deployed workloads designed to handle unique logic or capabilities tailored to organisational workflows, such as non-standard deployment pipelines or integration with bespoke tools or environments.

External Agents

External agents represent a new concept in GitLab’s agent system. Unlike the other types, these agents are not hosted within GitLab infrastructure and communicate with GitLab through a secure API. This allows third-party systems and services to interoperate with GitLab, empowering teams to leverage GitLab’s capabilities while using external infrastructure.

Benefits of Agent Type Flexibility

With a choice of foundational, custom, and external agents, GitLab facilitates a hybrid, extensible strategy for cluster and workload management. This flexibility supports a wide range of deployment and automation scenarios, enabling teams across industries to streamline DevOps practices.

Whether you’re starting with GitOps or scaling complex ecosystems, GitLab’s agent options provide an adaptive path to improved productivity, security, and integration.

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