External Resources

Goal

You will use _external when a team needs a reusable reference to a resource that another team manages.

Declare the external parent

An external resource selects an existing Konnect resource instead of managing that resource:

ai_gateways:
  - ref: external-shared-ai-gateway
    _external:
      selector:
        matchFields:
          display_name: Shared Federated AI Gateway

The local ref can then connect team-owned resources to the selected gateway:

ai_gateway_models:
  - ref: external-peer-support-assistant
    ai_gateway: !ref external-shared-ai-gateway#id
    name: external-peer-support-assistant

Use _external when a team needs a reusable declarative ref or needs to manage resources beneath an externally owned parent. The external declaration itself is not managed by kongctl and cannot have kongctl metadata.

The shared gateway must already exist before the peer team plans this configuration independently.