Solo Agentic Demo

A complete, scripted demo of Solo's agentic stack on a local k3d cluster:

• Ambient Mesh (Istio, via Gloo Operator) — automatic mTLS
• AgentGateway Enterprise — LLM + MCP gateway with auth, composable MCP, elicitation
• kagent Enterprise — Kubernetes-native AI agent runtime
• AgentRegistry Enterprise — agent/MCP catalog with RBAC and tracing
• Keycloak — OIDC for the UIs and RBAC

Two LLM providers (Anthropic + OpenAI), five MCP servers (local, remote, two composable, plus a federated "Virtual MCP" endpoint), and five agents — including a multi-model A2A orchestrator — all wired so every LLM and tool call flows through AgentGateway, with distributed tracing on every call (gateway spans + kagent agent spans → ClickHouse → the UI Tracing tab).

Files

File	Purpose
setup.sh	One-shot full deployment — cluster, mesh, AGW, kagent, AgentRegistry, all resources
demo.sh	Interactive, act-by-act walkthrough that builds the stack live (resets first)
DEMO.md	Presenter's runbook — prep, smoke test, act-by-act talking points, elicitation walkthrough, troubleshooting
port-forward.sh	Exposes all UIs/APIs locally (re-run if forwards die)
teardown.sh	Deletes the k3d cluster
.env.example	Template for secrets — cp .env.example .env and fill in (.env is gitignored)
manifests/	Every YAML resource, commented and standalone — see manifests/README.md

Prerequisites

• k3d, kubectl, helm, jq, openssl
• Solo licenses — one of:
  • SOLO_LICENSE_KEY in .env (a single trial license usually covers all products), or the per-product keys AGENTGATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY / SOLO_ISTIO_LICENSE_KEY / KAGENT_LICENSE_KEY; or
  • (Solo employees) the solo-io/licensing repo cloned at ~/licensing — setup auto-generates them (this path also needs go 1.24+); or
  • nothing set — setup will prompt you to paste each license.
• A GitHub OAuth App (callback URL http://localhost:9090/age/elicitations)
• Secrets in .env (preferred — set once) or exported env vars (or you'll be prompted):
  • ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY
  • GITHUB_CLIENT_ID, GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET

cp .env.example .env   # then fill in real values — both scripts source it automatically

Quick start

./setup.sh            # build everything (~15 min)
./port-forward.sh     # expose the UIs (started automatically by setup too)

Then open the Solo Enterprise UI at http://localhost:9090 (demo/demo).

Run the interactive demo

./demo.sh             # full walkthrough, press Enter to advance
./demo.sh --act 4     # reset, then play acts 1..N (1-7)
./demo.sh --reset     # clear demo resources, keep infrastructure

The seven acts:

1. AgentGateway — add Anthropic + OpenAI, call them through the gateway
2. MCP Servers — local, composable (zero-code), and remote MCP
3. Enterprise Security — ambient mTLS + GitHub OAuth elicitation (the OBO flow lives at the gateway layer — test it with MCP Inspector against /mcp/github-remote; it can't be a kagent tool because kagent discovers tools server-side without a user token)
4. kagent — ModelConfigs, RemoteMCPServers, and 5 agents (incl. A2A orchestrator)
5. AgentRegistry — catalog the agents/MCPs with 3-tier RBAC (applied via an in-cluster arctl helper pod — ar.dev objects are registry-API resources, not Kubernetes CRDs; see manifests/README.md)
6. Promote an MCP server to the gateway — take a cataloged-but-ungoverned MCP server, federate it onto AgentGateway (Virtual MCP), and repoint the catalog entry at the governed endpoint. (A composed workflow on documented features — not a one-click product action.)
7. Advanced AgentGateway — four "gateway power-user" capabilities: Eager Auth (apiKey + real OIDC/JWT against Keycloak, requests rejected at the gateway before backends are touched), Prompt Policies (PII masking, system-message injection, request defaults — all on the LLM backend), OpenAPI → MCP (auto-generate MCP tools from a REST spec, zero code), and Code Mode (one script tool that replaces N tool round-trips). See manifests/agw-advanced/ for the manifests.

demo.sh shows and applies the same files in manifests/, so the on-screen YAML is exactly what runs. Browse manifests/ to read the examples directly.

kagent-focused demo

A separate, tighter walkthrough of the kagent runtime — adding tools, adding tool servers, and promoting an agent from AgentRegistry onto kagent:

./kagent-demo.sh            # 3 acts: tool server → agent tools → AR promotion
./kagent-demo.sh --act 3    # jump to an act (1-3)
./kagent-demo.sh --reset    # remove just this demo's resources

See KAGENT-DEMO.md for the runbook. Act 3 promotes a packaged (container) agent whose source lives in agents-src/weatherwise/; setup.sh builds that image and loads it into k3d (Docker required for Act 3).

Agent Substrate sidetrack (alpha / experimental)

A separate sandbox for Agent Substrate — the Google-adjacent open-source layer that multiplexes many agent-like "actors" onto a small pool of warm Kubernetes pods, with per-actor gVisor isolation and full RAM/FS state snapshots across suspend/resume cycles.

Runs in its own kind cluster (with kagent OSS + UI), does NOT touch the main k3d demo:

./setup-substrate.sh           # kind cluster + Substrate + counter demo + kagent OSS/UI
./substrate-demo.sh            # 5 acts: model → resume → density → suspend →
                               #   deploy OpenClaw AgentHarness in the kagent UI
./substrate-demo.sh --reset    # delete created actors + harness, keep the pools
./teardown-substrate.sh        # nuke the kind cluster

Act 5 is the headline: a kagent AgentHarness (runtime: substrate, backend: openclaw) deployed and driven from the kagent UI — a real coding agent, gVisor-sandboxed on Substrate. The OpenClaw model config is built from your .env Anthropic key.

See SUBSTRATE-DEMO.md for the runbook. Substrate is explicitly pre-stable per upstream — "VERY early development. APIs are almost guaranteed to change." Pinned to a known-good commit in setup-substrate.sh; bump deliberately + re-validate.

URLs (after port-forward.sh)

URL	What	Login
http://localhost:9090	Solo Enterprise UI — the whole demo, incl. the GitHub OAuth consent redirect	demo / demo
http://localhost:8080	Keycloak (admin console and the OIDC issuer) — operator only	admin / admin
http://localhost:8081	AgentGateway Proxy (LLM + MCP routes) — debug only	—
http://localhost:12121	AgentRegistry API (for arctl) — operator only	—

The audience only ever sees localhost:9090. Login, agent chat, the GitHub OAuth consent (it redirects back to :9090/age/elicitations), and tracing all live there — no second tab, no curl. The other three ports are operator/debug.

One-time host entry (required for browser SSO). The Solo UI logs in via the in-cluster OIDC issuer keycloak.keycloak.svc.cluster.local:8080. Map it to the Keycloak port-forward so your browser can reach it:

echo "127.0.0.1 keycloak.keycloak.svc.cluster.local" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

This is why Keycloak is forwarded on 8080 (matching the issuer) and AgentGateway moved to 8081.

Architecture

User → Enterprise UI → AgentRegistry (catalog + RBAC)
  → kagent (runs agents as pods)
    → AgentGateway (LLM routing + auth)        → Anthropic / OpenAI
    → AgentGateway (MCP routing + elicitation) → MCP servers (local/remote/composable)
    → A2A protocol (agent-to-agent delegation)
  All pod-to-pod traffic encrypted by Ambient Mesh (ztunnel)

Good to know

• Tracing — every LLM/MCP call through the gateway and every agent run emits OTel spans (token counts, models, tools) → ClickHouse → the UI Tracing tab. Wired by manifests/observability/agentgateway-tracing.yaml + kagent's otel.tracing helm values (both applied by setup.sh).
• AgentRegistry → Gateways page is empty by design. AR's managed-gateway feature (ar.dev Gateway) only supports cloud runtimes (AWS BedrockAgentCore / Gemini) in v2026.5.4 — it provisions an EC2 AgentGateway. The kagent runtime has no gateway support, so /are/gateways stays empty for this stack.
• Placeholder keys — if .env still has template values, deployment works but live LLM calls (playground, agents) return 401s from the providers.
• k3d CNI quirk is auto-handled — setup.sh bind-mounts k3s's CNI conf dir and symlinks the istio-cni binary on each node; without this, istio ambient never activates on k3d (and in the worst case pod creation breaks).

Teardown

./teardown.sh         # deletes the 'ai-demo' k3d cluster