UiPath Orchestrator on AWS

Partner Solution Deployment Guide

QS

March 2021
Andrei Barbu and Adrian Tudoran, UiPath
Shivansh Singh and Tony Bulding, AWS Integration & Automation team

Refer to the GitHub repository to view source files, report bugs, submit feature ideas, and post feedback about this Partner Solution. To comment on the documentation, refer to Feedback.

This Partner Solution was created by UiPath in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Partner Solutions are automated reference deployments that help people deploy popular technologies on AWS according to AWS best practices. If you’re unfamiliar with AWS Partner Solutions, refer to the AWS Partner Solution General Information Guide.

Overview

This guide covers the information you need to deploy the UiPath Orchestrator Partner Solution in the AWS Cloud.

This Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Solution deploys [<product name>](<partner’s marketing product page>) in the AWS Cloud so that you can securely schedule, manage, and control your entire enterprise-wide digital workforce of UiPath software robots. Orchestrator manages the creation, monitoring, and deployment of RPA resources in your environment, acting as an integration point with third-party solutions and applications. For more information, refer to the UiPath Orchestrator documentation.

UiPath Orchestrator can manage your entire fleet, including the following UiPath Robot types:

  • Attended - A robot triggered by user events, operating alongside a human user, and sharing the same workstation. Used with UiPath Orchestrator for centralized process deployment and logging. They can also add data into a queue that is processed by unattended UiPath Robots.

  • Unattended - A robot that runs without human supervision in a virtual environment. They run, monitor, schedule, and support work queues remotely.

  • Development - An unattended robot used only for development purposes.

  • Nonproduction - An unattended robot used only for development and testing purposes.

Costs and licenses

A license for UiPath is required. To sign up, contact UiPath sales. A free 60-day non-production trial license is available.

During deployment, provide your UiPath Orchestrator and UiPath High-Availability add-on license keys on the Specify stack details page. Or, manually enter the license keys after the stack is deployed.

The Partner Solution uses only uses Microsoft Windows images and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution, provided by AWS. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) subscription is not required.

There is no cost to use this Partner Solution, but you will be billed for any AWS services or resources that this Partner Solution deploys. For more information, refer to the AWS Partner Solution General Information Guide.

Architecture

Deploying this Partner Solution with default parameters builds the following UiPath Orchestrator environment in the AWS Cloud.

Architecture
Figure 1. Partner Solution architecture for UiPath Orchestrator on AWS

As shown in Figure 1, this Partner Solution sets up the following:

  • A highly available architecture that spans two or more Availability Zones.*

  • A virtual private cloud (VPC) configured with public and private subnets, according to AWS best practices, to provide you with your own virtual network on AWS.*

  • In the public subnets:

    • A Windows bastion host to control inbound Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in the private subnets.*

    • AWS Storage Gateway providing the file gateway virtual machine image.

    • An Amazon EC2 instance hosting the file gateway.

    • Security groups for fine-grained inbound access to file gateway and bastion host instances.

  • In the private subnets:

    • An Amazon EC Auto Scaling group with up to 20 UiPath Orchestrator nodes. Nodes are hosted on Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server 2019.

    • A database subnet group for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) DB instances running SQL Server.

    • An Application Load Balancer to balance traffic between UiPath Orchestrator nodes.

    • High-availability add-on for UiPath Orchestrator in a three-node cluster of Amazon EC2 instances with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

    • Security groups for fine-grained access to UiPath Orchestrator and high-availability add-on instances.

  • AWS Certificate Manager for domain registration with a Secure Sockets Layer certificate.

  • Amazon Route 53 as Domain Name System provider to route traffic to the Application Load Balancer.

  • Amazon CloudWatch for log collection, storage, and analysis, and to enable complete visibility of robots and automation tasks.

  • Amazon S3 bucket for NuGet packages, the automation projects run by UiPath software robots.

  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role granting access to the S3 bucket to AWS Storage Gateway.

* The template that deploys this Partner Solution into an existing VPC skips the components marked by asterisks and prompts you for your existing VPC configuration.

Deployment options

This Partner Solution provides the following deployment options:

This Partner Solution provides separate templates for these options. It also lets you configure Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) blocks, instance types, and UiPath Orchestrator settings.

Predeployment steps

Key pair

Make sure that at least one Amazon EC2 key pair exists in your AWS account in the Region where the Quick Start is deployed. Save the key pair name, as you need it during deployment. To create a key pair, follow the instructions in Amazon EC2 key pairs and Linux instances. For testing or proof-of-concept purposes, we recommend creating a new key pair instead of using one that’s already being used by a production instance.

SSL certificate

This Quick Start requests a certificate from AWS Certificate Manager. It uses DNS certificate validation, using the DNS for the hosted zone that you have set up. If you already have a public certificate that you want to use, you can do so by providing the certificate’s Amazon Resource Number (ARN).

Valid domain name

This Quick Start assumes you have established ownership of the parent domain under which the web application will be served. You should have a hosted zone set up in your AWS account, with the required name server, start of authority, CNAME, and text records. For further details on how to create a public hosted zone, see Working with public hosted zones.

Prepare your UiPath account

This Quick Start uses AWS owned Amazon Machine Images (AMI). However, during the initiation of EC2 virtual machines (VMs), it downloads, installs, and configures UiPath Orchestrator and HAA. Before deployment, purchase UiPath Orchestrator and HAA add-on licenses by contacting UiPath directly.

Deployment steps

  1. Sign in to your AWS account, and launch this Partner Solution, as described under Deployment options. The AWS CloudFormation console opens with a prepopulated template.

  2. Choose the correct AWS Region, and then choose Next.

  3. On the Create stack page, keep the default setting for the template URL, and then choose Next.

  4. On the Specify stack details page, change the stack name if needed. Review the parameters for the template. Provide values for the parameters that require input. For all other parameters, review the default settings and customize them as necessary. When you finish reviewing and customizing the parameters, choose Next.

    Unless you’re customizing the Partner Solution templates or are instructed otherwise in this guide’s Predeployment section, don’t change the default settings for the following parameters: QSS3BucketName, QSS3BucketRegion, and QSS3KeyPrefix. Changing the values of these parameters will modify code references that point to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket name and key prefix. For more information, refer to the AWS Partner Solutions Contributor’s Guide.

  5. On the Configure stack options page, you can specify tags (key-value pairs) for resources in your stack and set advanced options. When you finish, choose Next.

  6. On the Review page, review and confirm the template settings. Under Capabilities, select all of the check boxes to acknowledge that the template creates AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resources that might require the ability to automatically expand macros.

  7. Choose Create stack. The stack takes about 25 minutes to deploy.

  8. Monitor the stack’s status, and when the status is CREATE_COMPLETE, the UiPath Orchestrator deployment is ready.

  9. To view the created resources, choose the Outputs tab.

Postdeployment steps

Test the deployment

  1. Verify that UiPath Orchestrator is deployed successfully by navigating to the Application Load Balancer endpoint URL. The Login screen shown in Figure 2 will display.

test1
Figure 2. Test the deployment

  1. Verify that HAA nodes are deployed successfully. From the bastion host, navigate to any endpoint IP address via https://haa-ip:8443.

test2
Figure 3. Logging into High Availability Add-on

  1. Log in, and verify that all nodes are present on the Nodes tab.

test3
Figure 4. Verifying nodes

  1. Verify that UiPath Orchestrator can upload to the S3 bucket via the file gateway server. To do this, navigate to the Application Load Balancer endpoint URL and log in. Then, choose Packages> Upload button > Select a NuGet package and choose Upload.

test4
Figure 5. Test the deployment

Troubleshooting

For troubleshooting common Partner Solution issues, refer to the AWS Partner Solution General Information Guide and Troubleshooting CloudFormation.

Customer responsibility

After you deploy a Partner Solution, confirm that your resources and services are updated and configured—including any required patches—to meet your security and other needs. For more information, refer to the Shared Responsibility Model.

Feedback

To submit feature ideas and report bugs, use the Issues section of the GitHub repository for this Partner Solution. To submit code, refer to the Partner Solution Contributor’s Guide. To submit feedback on this deployment guide, use the following GitHub links:

Notices

This document is provided for informational purposes only. It represents current AWS product offerings and practices as of the date of issue of this document, which are subject to change without notice. Customers are responsible for making their own independent assessment of the information in this document and any use of AWS products or services, each of which is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, whether expressed or implied. This document does not create any warranties, representations, contractual commitments, conditions, or assurances from AWS, its affiliates, suppliers, or licensors. The responsibilities and liabilities of AWS to its customers are controlled by AWS agreements, and this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement between AWS and its customers.

The software included with this paper is licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0 (the "License"). You may not use this file except in compliance with the License. A copy of the License is located at https://aws.amazon.com/apache2.0/ or in the accompanying "license" file. This code is distributed on an "as is" basis, without warranties or conditions of any kind, either expressed or implied. Refer to the License for specific language governing permissions and limitations.