Core Components UiPath: Studio-Robot-Orchestrator Ecosystem
Hello and welcome to this post on the core components of the UiPath Core Components Platform & Ecosystem. In this, we will learn about each component and How they work together.
Let’s have a quick review UiPath Studio is an automation tool for making business process automation. UiPath Robot is used for executing the process steps which were published to the orchestrator via UiPath Studio. UiPath orchestrator is a middle layer that the communication between the UiPath Studio and Robot for exchanging messages, and logs, monitoring automation tasks, and controls system.
Studio Robot Orchestrator Ecosystem
Let’s start the Review UiPath Core Components details steps involving the execution of the UiPath Automation lifecycle for automation task.
- 1 - UiPath Studio Create project for Business process Automation
- 2 - NuGet Packages Publish NuGet Packages via UiPath Studio to the local folder or UiPath Orchestrator
- 3 - Store Packages projects published to Orchestrator are stored as packages, along with their versions. If an updated version of a project is available, it is stored as a separate package in Orchestrator
- 4 - Publish Folders Published package is paired with a folder, it becomes a process and can be run by robots with access to the folder
- 5 - Human users Human users can trigger robots, through the UiPath Assistant tool to execute processes on their machines. We call these robots attended robots.
- 5 - Without Human users The robots deployed on separate machines, working without direct human intervention, are called Unattended Robots. Process execution for this type of robots is initiated and managed from Orchestrator.
- 6 - Orchestrator Process execution for this type of robots is initiated and managed from Orchestrator.
- 7 - Heartbeat Mechanism Be it attended or unattended, communication between Robots and the Orchestrator is always triggered by the Robot. This is done by the Robot Service component of the Robot through a heartbeat mechanism. Every 30 seconds, the Robot Service sends a heartbeat to the Orchestrator and waits for the Orchestrator to respond.
- 8 - Job info to the Robot :When there is a job to be done, the Orchestrator responds to the heartbeat by passing the job info to the robot.
In cases where there are multiple Orchestrators involved in the architecture, the packages that the robots need to execute jobs are kept in an external storage location. When a robot runs a job for the first time, it will not have the workflow available locally.
Detail View UiPath Studio-Robot-Orchestrator
UiPath Studio is an integrated development environment for Automation Developers to design, develop, and debug automation projects.
Studio can be connected to Orchestrator, making it easy to publish automation projects as NuGet packages, via the dedicated feeds. From there, they’re distributed to robots to be executed.
When we say Studio, we can think of two profiles, namely Studio and StudioX.
These are meant to match different coding skills that developers may have:
- StudioX is meant for business users looking to automate tasks for themselves and their immediate teams.
- Studio is meant for Automation developers looking to build complex unattended or attended process automations.
Depending on the type of Studio license an enterprise may purchase, Studio users can switch between Studio and StudioX profiles as they need.
A software robot is an execution agent that runs automations built with the Studio family and then published as packages either locally, or to Orchestrator.
There are two types of UiPath robots and they differ both in the way they work and in the way they’re licensed:
Attended robots
- They’re digital helpers for human users. They work on the same machines as us humans, during the same hours. They’re triggered directly by humans (usually through UiPath Assistant) or by an event related to what the human user does. For example, opening an application or receiving an email.
- UiPath Assistant is the component that provides a friendly interface to interact with attended robots. It is the tool that we use to easily access, manage, and run automations.
Unattended robots
- These are meant to work non-stop, with as little input from human users as possible. They’re deployed on separate machines and their jobs are triggered exclusively from Orchestrator.
- Their interactions with human users are typically handled with as little disruption as possible, by creating and sending requests for human input or validation as tasks.
While these await to be processed, unattended robots can continue their work by picking up other jobs.
When human input is finally provided, unattended robots can resume their work on the process.
Automation Cloud Robots
Automation Cloud Robots (ACRs) are SaaS robots hosted in the UiPath Automation Cloud that let you quickly run automations without building or managing your own unattended Robot infrastructure. They come in two flavors:
- VM Automation Cloud Robots.
- Access to a fully customizable Windows virtual machine and set up UiPath Robots to run any job in a matter of minutes. Learn more here(opens in a new tab).
- Serverless Automation Cloud Robots (Linux based cloud robots).
- Run background, cross-platform projects easily without worrying about infrastructure setup. So, you’re able to provision, manage and scale these robots from Automation Cloud. In other words, UiPath takes care of everything—infrastructure, and robots. Learn more here(opens in a new tab).
Test Robots
These robots can be deployed to execute tests on-demand, continuously, and at scale. Here are some of the characteristics of a test robot:
- Purpose built for testing workflows, activities, and applications.
- Provides flexibility in managing and reusing test cases across projects.
- Enables activity level unit testing out-of-the-box.
Orchestrator, the heart of automation management, is a web application that allows managing, controlling, and monitoring the robots and the automations.
With Orchestrator we can deploy, trigger, measure, provision, track, and ensure the security of every robot in the organization.
Orchestrator also functions as a repository for libraries, reusable components, assets, and processes used by robots or by developers.
The main capabilities of Orchestrator are:
- Provisioning: creates and maintains the connection with robots.
- Control and license distribution: enables the creation, assignment and maintenance of licenses, roles, permissions, groups, and folder hierarchies.
- Automation storage and distribution: allows the controlled storage and distribution of automation projects, assets, and credentials, as well as large files used in automations.
- Running automation jobs in unattended mode: enables the creation and distribution of automation jobs in various ways, including through queues and triggers.
- Monitoring: allows monitoring of jobs and robots and stores logs for auditing and analytics.
Architecture UiPath Core Components
Core Components Attended Robots
Core Components Un-Attended Robots
Summary
UiPath offers a powerful suite of tools to manage and execute automations across your organization. Here’s a breakdown of the UiPath Core Components :
UiPath Studio: This development environment empowers automation specialists to design, build, and test automation workflows. Studio seamlessly integrates with Orchestrator for easy deployment.
UiPath Robots: These software programs execute the automations created in Studio. They can be deployed in two ways:
Attended Robots: These robots work alongside human users, triggered through the UiPath Assistant tool for specific tasks.
Unattended Robots: Designed for independent operation, these robots run on separate machines and handle tasks without human intervention.
UiPath Orchestrator: This central hub acts as the maestro of your automation orchestra. Orchestrator manages the entire robot lifecycle, including deployment, scheduling, execution tracking, and security.