Microsoft has announced its Power Automate service now provides support for two hosted RPA scenarios. These give developers and admins in the Center of Excellence to create and scale their automations.
In a blog post, the company says the following hosted RPA scenarios are landing on Microsoft Power Automate:
- “Individual hosted machines, now available in preview, enable developers to build or test automation and business users to run automation.
- Hosted machine groups are generally available and automatically scale workloads to optimize unattended automation in production, delivering improved business process continuity and governance at scale.”
Power Automate used to be known as Microsoft Flow before it was rebranded at Ignite 2019. It is a part of the Power Platform alongside Power BI and PowerApps.
This is a service that allows users to create automated workflows across applications. It can be described as an enterprise-oriented IFTTT competitor. By creating automated chains, users can get data collection, file synchronization, and notifications.
It also has Robotic process automation (RPA).
Hosted RPA Scenarios
Starting with individual hosted machines, developers have a fast way to build, test, and run desktop flows efficiently. Importantly, this means they can use Microsoft Power Automate without setting up a physical machine.
“When testing is complete, the desktop flow can be deployed on a single machine to support individual business users running in both attended and unattended mode.”
Next are hosted machine groups. Microsoft points out that setting up variable RPA’s takes time and come with challenges. With hosted machine groups, developers can use Power Automate to automatically provision hosted RPA bots when needed.
“When a desktop flow waits in the queue and no bot is available, a new bot is created automatically up to the maximum number of bots determined by the admin. There is no need to set up or register those machines and they can be easily reassigned to different workloads whenever you need them.”
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