It never accepts an inbound connection
The Outpost opens a connection outward and holds it open. Calls travel down that existing connection, so from your firewall’s point of view there is nothing to allow — it is the same outbound access your CI already has. No inbound rule, no exposed port, no address of yours to publish.Which path a call takes
Three paths, and the one that applies depends on where the agent runs, not on a negotiation at call time.
The middle row is the one worth getting right: when the agent and the service are on the same
network, the call should not leave that network. You choose per agent, on the deploy wizard’s MCP
step — the platform does not infer it, because the only location signal an agent gives is a name the
process declares about itself, and guessing a routing decision from that would be worse than asking.
It is built to refuse
The Outpost holds network access its callers do not have, so it starts from deny.- Deny-by-default allowlist, on scheme, host, port, and an optional path prefix. An empty allowlist allows nothing.
- Host matching is exact, or one leading wildcard label, compared label by label — never a
substring or suffix. A suffix match on
internal.example.comwould also be satisfied byinternal.example.com.attacker.test. - A path prefix matches on segment boundaries, so
/mcpdoes not admit/mcp-admin. - Addresses are checked after DNS resolves, because the resolver is yours and a name can resolve anywhere. Loopback, link-local, and the cloud metadata address are refused outright.
- A redirect off the allowlist is not followed. The relay re-checks its own rules on every hop.
- Caller credentials are never passed upstream.
Enrolling one
Creating an Outpost issues a long-lived credential, shown once, and that credential is the Outpost’s whole identity — it resolves to your workspace and that one Outpost. Store it before you leave the screen, then run the install command with it. The credential is never written to a log, a trace, or an audit record’s detail.Rotating the credential drops the live connection. The Outpost stays down until you redeploy it with
the new value, so rotation is a planned action rather than a safe click — which is why it is a
separate permission from editing an Outpost.
Next steps
MCP Gateway
The tool surface an Outpost carries calls to.
Network & egress control
The wider network posture this fits into.
Deployment methods
Where agents run, which decides which path applies.
Integration groups
Grouping the tool servers an agent may reach.