UiPath is introducing a new robot orchestration feature (preview) named as Elastic Robot Orchestration.
If you are a customer of UiPath and have your RPA platform hosted on one of the public clouds like Azure, Amazon or Google then elastic robot orchestration is something you will be interested to look at. Until now, if you configure an unattended robot on your cloud infrastructure, the VM would be up and running for 24 x 7 for which you would incur the cloud VM cost. Usually the actual robot utilization may be much less than 100% in a day. Maybe you need the robot VM running for a couple of hours a day.
Now with the introduction of Elastic Robot Orchestration you can dynamically provision, scale and optimize unattended robots. When the robots are idle the VM’s will be automatically put off and you don’t incur any additional cost. This can substantially lower your cloud costs. Elastic Robot Orchestration is also designed to automate more of the maintenance overhead associated with running robots by keeping robots in those VM’s up to date.
For now, this feature is in the public preview and soon you can see this rolling out as part of the product in Q2 as per UiPath. Community users shall see this preview update immediately. If you are an Enterprise customer and willing to test this feature, you will be able to request via UiPath Insider Program.
With the current preview, this feature works with Microsoft Azure and support for AWS and Google cloud is expected soon after. Elastic Robot Orchestration will be delivered as a new additional feature in the Automation Cloud Orchestrator, with zero cost. Customers can opt to enable the feature or continue to use without enabling it.
How do I set up Elastic Robot Orchestration for preview?
There are a few steps. Please see the full documentation here
How is this different from Unattended Robot Auto Scaling add-on
If you are familiar with Unattended Robot Auto Scaling, Elastic Robot Orchestration is designed with similar focus. but it is less-customizable solution built directly into Automation Cloud. Unattended Robot Auto Scaling, by contrast, is an extremely customizable add-on solution for customers who want deep flexibility in their IT Automation. It works with Orchestrator in both the Automation Cloud and on-premises but does require more initial design and configuration.
Keep Automating !