Deploying UiPath Automation Suite: An Easy-to-Understand Guide - Part 2 Automation Suite Architecture

The UiPath Automation Platform is a comprehensive solution designed to streamline and enhance automation processes within organizations. Its architecture demonstrates scalability, flexibility, and integration capabilities, ensuring that all aspects of automation. This article delves into the various layers and components that constitute the UiPath Automation Platform, as depicted in the architecture diagram.

UiPath Product Layer

At the top of the architecture lies the UiPath Product Layer, encompassing a diverse array of modules tailored to address various automation needs:

• Document Understanding: Facilitates intelligent document processing using AI to extract, interpret, and process information from documents.
• Insights: Provides powerful analytics and reporting capabilities to track, measure, and optimize automation performance.
• Orchestrator: Acts as the central management console for deploying, monitoring, and controlling automated workflows.
• Task Mining: Identifies and analyzes tasks performed by users to uncover automation opportunities.
• Test Manager: Manages and executes test automation to ensure the reliability and performance of automated processes.
• Action Center: Enables human-robot collaboration by allowing users to handle exceptions and approvals.
• AI Center: Integrates machine learning models into automation workflows for enhanced decision-making.
• Apps: Develops custom applications to extend automation capabilities.
• Automation Hub: Centralizes automation initiatives and fosters collaboration and governance.
• Automation Ops: Manages the operational aspects of automation deployments.
• Administrative Platform: Provides tools for administration and configuration management.
• Data Service: Offers a unified data model for storing and managing data across automation workflows.
• Process Mining: Analyzes business processes to identify and prioritize automation opportunities.
• Automation Suite Robots: Manages the deployment and execution of software robots.

Fabric Layer

The Fabric Layer underpins the UiPath Product Layer, providing essential infrastructure components that ensure stability and scalability:

• ArgoCD: Open-source declarative CD tool for Kubernetes. It follows the GitOps pattern of using Git repositories as the source of truth for defining the desired application state. It provides application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities for Automation Suite components and UiPath? services that run in a Kubernetes cluster.
• Redis: An in-memory data structure store used for caching and real-time analytics, providing centralized cache functionality.
• Velero: A backup and recovery solution for Kubernetes clusters and persistent volumes, allowing snapshot backup and restore operations.

Monitoring & Logging Layer

Effective monitoring and logging are crucial for maintaining the health and performance of the automation platform. This layer includes:

• Alert Manager: Open-source tool that helps handling alerts sent by client applications such as the Prometheus server. It is responsible for deduplicating, grouping, and routing them to the correct receiver integrations, such as email, PagerDuty, or OpsGenie.
• Prometheus: Open-source system monitoring toolkit for Kubernetes. It can scrape or accept metrics from Kubernetes components as well as workloads running in the clusters and store those in time series database.
• Grafana: Open-source visualization tool used for querying and visualizing data stored in Prometheus. You can create and ship a variety of dashboards for cluster and service monitoring.
• Thanos: Extends Prometheus' capabilities by enabling highly available, long-term storage and querying of metrics, pushing Prometheus metrics to an object store for persistence.
• FluentD / Fluent Bit: Open-source reliable log scraping solution. The logging operator deploys and configures a background process on every node to collect container and application logs from the node file system.

Networking & Security Layer

Networking and security are foundational to any enterprise platform, and this layer includes:

• ISTIO: An open-source service mesh that provides functionalities such as ingress, request routing, and traffic monitoring for microservices running inside the Kubernetes cluster.
• Cert Manager: Automates the management and issuance of TLS certificates for secure communication within the cluster.
• OPA Gatekeeper: An open-source policy enforcement tool that allows Kubernetes administrators to implement policies ensuring compliance and best practices within their clusters.

Kubernetes Layer

At the core of the infrastructure is the Kubernetes Layer, which orchestrates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications:

• RKE 2 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2): Rancher-provided Kubernetes distribution that runs all the architectural components and services, ensuring reliable and easy container orchestration and management.

Operating Systems Layer

Beneath the Kubernetes layer lies the Operating Systems Layer, which consists of the underlying kernel that provides the necessary system resources and services to run applications:

• Kernel: The core of the operating system, managing hardware resources and providing essential services for application execution.

Storage Layer

The foundation of the architecture is the Storage Layer, ensuring that data is securely stored and readily accessible:

• Objectstore (AzureStorage / S3 Compatible): Provides scalable object storage for unstructured data.
• Microsoft SQL Server: A relational database management system for structured data storage and management.
• OCI-compliant Registry: An open-source docker registry used for storing and managing container images in compliance with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards, enabling pushing and pulling of install-time and runtime container images.

Additional Third-Party Components

In addition to its native components, the UiPath Automation Platform leverages several third-party tools to enhance its functionality:

• CEPH Object Store: An open-source storage provider that offers Amazon S3-compliant object/blob storage on top of persistent volumes created by Longhorn, enabling services to use blob storage-like functionality for their operations.
• Docker Registry: Optional if you have an external registry, this open-source tool is used for pushing and pulling install-time and runtime container images within your premises.