Architecture
How Admiral runs - the managed control plane and your execution fleet
Admiral is a hosted product. The control plane is managed by Admiral and runs at api.admiral.io; you never install or operate a server. What runs in your world is an agent inside each target you want to deploy to. This page covers that split. For the resource model (Sources, Components, Changesets, and so on) start with the Concepts overview.
The shape
Control flows one direction: agents dial out to Admiral and pull their work. Admiral never reaches into your accounts or clusters, and holds no standing credentials to them.
Admiral Cloud (the control plane)
The control plane is the always-on coordination layer that Admiral operates for you. It owns no execution; it computes desired state, hands out work, and records history. It is reachable two ways:
- the web for interactive use, and
- the API at
api.admiral.iofor the CLI, Terraform provider, Go SDK, and your own automation.
All platform state - applications, environments, components, changesets, runs, revisions, agents, sources, and credentials - lives in Admiral Cloud. You do not provision a database or object storage; that is part of the managed service.
Your execution fleet (agents)
Agents are where deployments actually run, inside targets you own. An agent registers with Admiral, runs next to your workloads, and pulls its own work. There are two kinds:
- Terraform agents execute
infrastructurecomponents (Terraform) wherever they have cloud access. They pull plan and apply jobs. - Kubernetes agents execute
workloadcomponents (Helm, Kustomize, raw manifests) from inside the Kubernetes cluster they manage, GitOps-style. They pull rendered revisions and reconcile them.
Both are kinds of the one Agent concept. See Agents & Execution.
Agents are outbound-only. An agent dials api.admiral.io and needs no inbound path, no port mapping, and no route back from Admiral. This is why an agent in a local kind cluster works fine for evaluation: it just needs outbound internet.
Interfaces
Everything available in the web UI is available programmatically:
- CLI -
admiralfor day-to-day operation and CI. - Terraform Provider - manage Admiral resources declaratively.
- Go SDK - build automation against the API.
- OpenAPI - the REST contract behind the API reference.
Why it is shaped this way
- Hosted control plane means no server to install, scale, patch, or back up. You start from a signup, not an installation.
- Pull-based execution means Admiral coordinates many clouds and clusters without ever being a point of inbound access to any of them.
- Self-contained desired state (copy, not link) means an environment is answerable from its own data, and editing a shared template never changes a placed component silently.