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§03 — Exo Operator

Runtime images

The operator doesn't run your agents itself — it launches pods from a set of adaptivelive/* images. Here's the full matrix and how to repoint any of it.

5 min read·Set by Exo Editorial·v0.3.0 Beta

When the operator reconciles a CR it creates pods from published images. The manager image is one; the rest are launched on demand based on an Agent's runtime and session recording. Knowing the matrix matters for capacity planning and for air-gapped mirroring.

Operator-launched infrastructure

●infra images· text
1Component            Default image (under adaptivelive/)   Override env var
2─────────            ───────────────────────────────────   ────────────────
3Manager              agentkube-manager                      AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_MANAGER
4Agentlet (per run)   agentkube-agentlet                     AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_AGENTLET
5Session recorder     agentkube-session-recorder             AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_SESSION_RECORDER

The agentlet is the sidecar/wrapper that runs inside an Agent and drives the runtime CLI; the session recorder captures the asciicast stream.

Agent runtimes

An Agent's spec.runtime selects which coding-agent image the pod runs. Each has a pinned tag and a token env var the operator wires from the Agent's agentToken Secret.

●runtime images· text
1runtime       image (adaptivelive/)   token env          override
2───────       ─────────────────────   ─────────          ────────
3ClaudeCode    claudecode              ANTHROPIC_API_KEY  AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_CLAUDECODE
4Codex         codex                   OPENAI_API_KEY     AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_CODEX
5OpenCode      opencode                OPENCODE_API_KEY   AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_OPENCODE
6Aider         aider                   OPENAI_API_KEY     AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_AIDER
7Cline         cline                   ANTHROPIC_API_KEY  AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_CLINE
8Goose         goose                   OPENAI_API_KEY     AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_GOOSE
9Cursor        cursor                  CURSOR_API_KEY     AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_CURSOR
10Custom        (you supply spec.image)  —                 —

Overriding images

Three levers, in precedence order:

  • Per resource. An Agent's spec.image (or a Tool's custom image) wins for that object.
  • Per image, cluster-wide. The AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_* env vars above, set on the manager Deployment, override one image verbatim.
  • Registry prefix. AGENTKUBE_IMAGE_REGISTRY rewrites every default ref onto your mirror.
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