Automation Cloud Robot - VM is now in public preview!

[Update 4/6/22: There are now two types of Automation Cloud Robot in preview - VM and Serverless. This post has been updated to clarify that it is about the Automation Cloud Robot - VM]

One last 2021 milestone announcement for our Automation Cloud™ Enterprise customers: to cap off a big year for Automation Cloud, we’re excited to announce the public preview of Automation Cloud Robot - VM!

With VM Cloud Robots, we’re adding a fully SaaS option for your Unattended Robots in Automation Cloud Enterprise – no infrastructure required to get the robot capacity you need when you need it.

If you have been using Elastic Robot Orchestration, the concept is similar but requires even less infrastructure and management on your part. Elastic Robot Orchestration requires you to host the robot Virtual Machines in a public cloud yourself, then spins them up and down for you as required. With VM Cloud Robots, everything is hosted by UiPath and delivered on demand – so you don’t need to provide any of your own cloud capacity.

To use VM Cloud Robots, standard Virtual Machines with robots included can be provisioned with a few clicks in Automation Cloud, and jobs can then be run in just a few minutes at whatever scale you require.

The Automation Cloud Robot - VM architecture is very flexible and designed for a wide range of scenarios. For example, if the standard images don’t meet your needs, you can configure your own base image snapshots that includes any additional software you need in the Virtual Machines. This can include VPN software and configurations to connect back to your network, and/or connecting the Virtual Machines to your domain. Then, we can create as much capacity as you need on our infrastructure automatically - using that image snapshot.

We have some further capabilities coming before General Availability (our supported release), but if you’re interested in trying out a VM Cloud Robot now, we’ve added a preview license to each enterprise customer account for the preview period, expected to be 3-4 months, so please go right ahead. Documentation is here. A reminder that this is a preview service, so please use it in test scenarios as it is not supported for production use yet, but we invite you to join our UiPath Insider program to give us your feedback on the product before its production release.

We’re very excited to be able to share this new milestone with you. To all our Automation Cloud users in both community and enterprise, happy holidays, and thank you for being a UiPath customer!

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Wow this is insane! I wonder how reliable and performant it is compared to hosting on my own hardware / VMs. Will definitely try this out!! Great job guys and gals!

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I tried to use this but it gives the license error. I am sure that I have the 5 bot licenses that I have not used up yet.

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Did anyone try this ?
@kirankumar.mahanthi1 @Palaniyappan @loginerror @Pablito @Yoichi

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Hi,

Did you assign the license to the tenant in AutomationCloud as the following?

Regards,

Hi Vishal,

i did not get chance to use this stuff since we are using on prem enterprise orchestrator at our end. but based on the screenshot and information i am realizing that this is machine template feature with additional options.

one suggestion from my end like did you tried with Advanced settings under cloud robot pool in the above image i could see that Geoff went for Static IP address selection. Could you please use the same setting and see since some cases dynamic IP would cause the issue. if still not working please explore the other options in the advanced settings.

Thanks for tagging me it is kind of learning for me too and will helpful in future if we migrate our on prem to cloud. thanks again.

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Hi @Yoichi ,

is that separate licenses are available for automation cloud robots. Good to know. do you know if we already have existing un attended robot licenses will work for automation cloud robots since if any one who wants to migrate from on prem to cloud orchestrator what would happen to the existing un attended licenses. thanks for sharing info.

Hi @kirankumar.mahanthi1 ,

As this function is still public preview (not GA yet), i cannot get any information about it. Hope UiPath announce it in details soon.

Regards,

ok got it. Thanks @Yoichi for your response. i hope the same we will get more details from UiPath.

Thanks @Yoichi for the screenshot. However, I do not get this option for allocating the Automation Cloud Robot license. I don’t see any option to enable it as well. What am I missing ?

Hi,

Can you try to click “Edit License Allocation” as the following?

Regards,

Thanks @Yoichi for your reply. Turns out that this feature was not there in the enterprise trial account. But I see it on our enterprise paid account so I think I am good.

Only thing is that as this is in public preview, will we get charged if we try to see how it works ? I believe it should not be the case, right?

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@Yoichi Does this mean that in future, we can expect to spin up robots on demand? i.e. something like spinning up EC2 instance on demand in AWS.

I really hope that this kind of model is available going forward.

I feel that the current model where the user needs to procure a yearly license is against the cloud philosophy of Pay as you Go :slight_smile:

Hi @Vishal_Kalra ,

It seems like VM on cloud. FYI, I’ll attach the following image.

Only thing is that as this is in public preview, will we get charged if we try to see how it works ? I believe it should not be the case, right?

I want to believe it’s free during public preview.

I feel that the current model where the user needs to procure a yearly license is against the cloud philosophy of Pay as you Go

For now, as there seems no page to show running time, it looks like license charge is same as other robot license. However, we won’t know for sure until GA.

Regards,

Thanks @Yoichi

thank you so much.

this is totally insane.
RAM 16GB.

@Geoff Thanks for the update.

While trying to create the “Cloud- Robot serverless(Preview)”, it’s directly navigating to the Machine Template. Please find the images below. Are there any other configurations required here? I’m using the community edition and am not able to see the Cloud Robot license in the license tab(img 3)

Step 1: Clicking on Cloud Robot-Serverless

Step 2: Directly navigated to the Machine Template.

img 3:

Hi @rhl.unnikrishnan92

I believe this is all you need - which is the template that you can then assign to your desired folders (such as your personal workspace folder).