With the introduction of Ephemeral Agents, Bamboo now defaults every new build with no special Requirement set to an Ephemeral Agent first, regardless of other Agent types that may be already online and idle, such as Local, Remote, and Elastic Agents. This behaviour makes Bamboo launch an Ephemeral Agent for every build and does not allow users to choose the priority in which Jobs will be picked up unless they set specific Requirements for each build. Ephemeral agents, while an attractive solution, may not always be the best choice for customers that prefer to utilise Agents that are already online and idle before attempting to start a Kubernetes Pod under Ephemeral Agents.

Introduce a Global setting in Bamboo to set the Agent assignment priority and an optional per-Project and per-Plan priority. This would allow teams with different profiles to have their preferred Agent assignment order while sharing online Agent resources of different types in case their preferred "owners" are not using them.

Benefits:

1. More control over Agent assignment: Users will have the ability to prioritise the Agent assignment according to their specific needs and preferences
2. Optimal resource utilisation and cost reduction: This feature would enable better resource utilisation by ensuring that online and idle agents are used before starting new Kubernetes Pods under Ephemeral Agents. For example, Remote Agents may typically receive builds online during business hours. However, they can be shut down during off hours, making Bamboo offload the work to Ephemeral Agents at night
3. Flexibility: The ability to set the priority on a per-Project and per-Plan basis would allow different teams within an organisation to have their preferences and requirements met without affecting the overall system configuration
4. Simplified management: Introducing a Global setting for Agent assignment priority would make it easier for administrators to manage resource usage across the entire Bamboo instance.