A Bamboo agent is a service that provides capabilities to run Job builds. There are two types of Bamboo agents:

• local agents run as part of the Bamboo server.
• remote agents are computers other than the Bamboo server that run the remote agent tool.
  An elastic agent is a remote agent that runs in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Local agents run in the server's process, i.e. in the same JVM as the server. Each remote agent runs in its own process, i.e. has its own JVM.)