Hello @danyel117, Welcome to the UiPath forum community!
I’ll try to explain the difference between these concepts to the best of my knowledge, but I’d still encourage you to read through the official documentations and go through the UiPath Academy.
Now let’s proceed to your questions:
Orchestrator:
The Orchestrator is one of the main components that UiPath offers together with UiPath Studio & Robot. It is a server-based web application whose main purpose is to allow for easy management of Robots, licenses, and automation jobs.
It is primarily managed by a “host admin”, who has the capability to create & manage tenants, change configurations/settings, monitor & manage licenses. Host admin credentials are provided by UiPath at the time of the purchase for the Enterprise version or at the successful registration for the Community version.
Now to make things even easier to manage, data/components inside the Orchestrator are usually grouped together by what we call “Tenants”. Some samples of these “components” that are handled by the tenant are: the Jobs, Queues, Robots, Packages, Assets, Environments, Machines. You can read more about it in the “About Tenants” page of the official Orchestrator documentation.
An admin of course can create multiple tenants if needed.
The Orchestrator can also store multiple versions of these processes in case the developer would make modifcations to the previous projects and re-publish them to the Orchestrator.
This can be useful when you want to roll-back to a previous version of the automation, reasons for the roll-back can vary from bugs with the latest developed automation / version compatibility issue.
Think of the Orchestrator as a command center/hub, where you can “orchestrate” almost everything related to your automations.
Service:
Service (solely in terms of the Orchestrator): is simply the new name used for a Tenant in the latest updates of the Orchestrator. Once you access this via Orchestrator then you will be able to access & manage all the other components that I mentioned before.
Service (with regards to Machine-UiPath relation):
Now, with regards to Machine-UiPath relation, the service that’s relied on is called the UiPath.Service.UserHost or UiPath.Service.Host (depending on your installation, you can see this using TaskManager).
It is a component of the UiPath Robot and is responsible for connecting and maintaining the connection between the Orchestrator and the Executor (another component of the UiPath Robot) through “heartbeats” or status report signals.
Whenever you start a job from Orchestrator, Studio, or Robot Tray (UiPath.Agent, another component of UiPath Robot & client of Service) it communicates with the service first before proceeding with the job execution.
Robot:
The Robot is one of the main components offered by UiPath . Its responsibility is to handle the execution of automation workflows.
Its components include: Service, Agent, Executor.
Robots can be installed in computers with or without Studio, and can be provisioned locally or via Orchestrator.
There are multiple types of Robots and all have different functions. They are usually classified as Attended, Unattended, Development/NonProd, and the type of robot that you have depends on the type of license that you have.
Their execution method capabilities (via Studio, Robot Tray, Orchestrator) would also depend on their type.
Sample: You cannot execute an Attended Robot via Orchestrator.
Robot-Orchestrator Relation:
As I mentioned before you can provision a Robot via the Orchestrator, and once provisioned you can then proceed to assign jobs to be executed by the Robot and even create schedules on when it will be executed by the Robot (assigning jobs to robots & creating schedules are part of the Orchestrator functionalities as well).
Once provisioned you can then assign the Robot to a specific Environment or even multiple Environments.
Environment:
An Environment is basically the groupings/catergories you want for your Robots in the Orchestrator. The groupings/category would of course depend on the user of the Orchestrator, but always remember best practices when doing so.
For example you want a group of robots to be focused solely on a specific process then you can group them together in the same Environment in Orchestrator. And name that Environment something that’s related to the process.
The main purpose of the Environment is for easier management. Grouping robots together makes it easier for users to know which group of robots is supposed to execute which process and when.
It can also be used to separate Robot according to their types (i.e development and production).
Machine:
Machines are basically just the computer where the Robot is installed and where it’s going to execute its designated jobs. It can be your personal computer or work stations.
Designating Machines to the Orchestrator is basically just making a connection between the two by giving the Orchestrator the necessary credentials (Domain\Username + Password) in order to access that particular machine.
After a Machine is “created” in the Orchestrator you can then assign Robots to it (so long as a Robot is already installed in that machine) in order to execute automation projects.
Now, the relationship between Robots and Machines will depend on how you provisioned them in Orchestrator, As we have 2 classifactions for both of them.
