High availability and geo-redundancy are popular topics as our customers scale their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) infrastructure, and the business impact of robot downtime becomes greater.
“high availability” means having two or more instances of a service running and synchronized so that if one fails, the service remains available.
“Geo-redundancy” is a specific approach that places those instances in different countries, to protect against potentially more significant threats.
For on-premises, third-party, and hybrid configurations, the new solution form UiPath is the High Availability add-on for UiPath Orchestrator. It’s built on, and replaces, REDIS, which many customers have used previously – but it comes from UiPath and delivers on key capabilities customers have been asking for:
• A fully supported, enterprise-grade UiPath redundancy solution
• Active-Active failover support with local latency
• Easy upgradability from REDIS (open source or Enterprise), our previous recommendation
• Scalability from two UiPath Orchestrator instances up to the largest global installations
Orchestrator, lets you optimize your robot workforce. Among other things, Orchestrator prioritizes (and in some cases initiates) robots’ work, shares information between them, and lets you manage, monitor, and audit robots from one place. With Orchestrator, software robots do more for your business, and as your business scales robot use, Orchestrator itself becomes more and more critical to your RPA environment.
One Orchestrator can handle a lot of robots in a typical configuration, but any product running on a single server is vulnerable to failure if something happens to that server. This is where the High Availability add-on is like an insurance policy that keeps your robot fleet running. The High Availability add-on enables you to add a second Orchestrator server to your environment that is always fully synchronized with the first server. If anything happens to one of the servers (from disaster to planned maintenance), then the workload is picked up seamlessly by the other. Your robots carry on supporting your business as though nothing happened.
The High Availability add-on can be used further to enable geo-redundancy: two or more Orchestrator servers can be installed in multiple countries, providing local latencies under normal conditions. However, if one of those servers fails, the others immediately pick up the workload.If you are running Orchestrator in a third-party cloud, then you may be less concerned about hardware failure – but you may still want to regionalize your Orchestrators and protect against needing to take one offline, especially when your compliance requirements mandate the ability to provide a full audit 24/7.
The High Availability add-on is always required when you want to run more than one connected and synchronized Orchestrator instance, whether you are running these on your own physical hardware, virtualized hardware in the cloud, or a hybrid scenario.
