[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!