Introduction

What is AgentMetal and why it exists — an alternative cloud platform where AI agents manage services on bare metal.

Introduction to AgentMetal

What is AgentMetal?

AgentMetal is an alternative cloud platform where AI agents manage infrastructure services on bare-metal servers. Instead of relying on traditional cloud providers with opaque control planes, AgentMetal uses specialized AI agents to provision, configure, monitor, and heal every service in your stack.

Key Benefits

  • 80%+ cost savings compared to AWS, GCP, or Azure by running on bare-metal servers you control
  • Self-healing infrastructure — agents detect failures and remediate automatically
  • Predictive scaling — agents analyze usage patterns and scale resources before demand spikes
  • Full audit trail — every action an agent takes is logged with its reasoning, so you always know why something changed
  • Open-source foundations — every managed service is backed by proven open-source technology

Architecture Overview

AgentMetal is composed of three core components:

ComponentRole
API ServerREST API gateway; validates requests, persists desired state, emits events
Agent RuntimeHosts the 13 specialized AI agents that reconcile desired vs. actual state
SchedulerTriggers periodic reconciliation, health checks, and maintenance tasks
Supporting infrastructure:
  • etcd — distributed key-value store for resource state and leader election
  • NATS — lightweight messaging for event-driven communication between components
  • PostgreSQL — stores audit logs, operation history, and analytics
  • Prometheus — metrics collection for agent decision-making

Managed Services

AgentMetal provides 10 fully managed services:

  1. Compute — Virtual machines via QEMU/KVM
  2. Database — PostgreSQL and MySQL with automated failover
  3. Storage — S3-compatible object storage via MinIO
  4. Load Balancer — L4/L7 load balancing via HAProxy
  5. DNS — Authoritative DNS via PowerDNS
  6. Networking — VPCs, subnets, and security groups via WireGuard + nftables
  7. Kubernetes — Lightweight clusters via K3s
  8. Cache — Redis with sentinel and cluster modes
  9. Message Queue — RabbitMQ and NATS messaging
  10. Serverless — Function-as-a-Service via Firecracker microVMs

Next Steps

  • Installation — Set up AgentMetal locally
  • Quickstart — Deploy your first resources in minutes
  • Concepts — Understand the resource model, agents, and reconciliation loop