Multicloud deployment
Cloud Agents are Agents hosted in a cloud service provider of your choice. If you are planning of having both PaaS and Cloud Agents in your Frends then we are talking about a multicloud deployment. PaaS and Cloud Agents cannot be deployed to the same Agent Group, but you can create different Agents Groups for PaaS Agents and Cloud Agents.
A prerequisite for Multicloud deployment is that you need to have a cloud service provider in use to which you can deploy your Agents and you need to have sufficient permissions to deploy resources to the cloud service provider. You also need to have admin permissions in your Frends to create new Agents and Agent Groups in Frends.
Since an Agent is just a machine running C# code, installation of a Frends Agent to a virtual machine in your selected cloud service provider is basically the same as installing a Frends Agent to a physical machine. Instructions for installing an Agent can be found from Frends Documentation.
Deploying Cloud Agents will enable you have scalable Agents of which you have full control. You can restrict access to that Agent, define which services the Agent is able to access, and you can easily add more Agents by adding similar machines to your cloud service provider and then installing Frends Agent to those machines.
Having some of your Agents in your cloud service provider will give you more control, but also more responsibility. You have to monitor those Agents yourself to make sure that the Agents are running as expected and that they don't crash due to insufficient memory or CPU power. In addition, when your Frends is updated, you have to update the Cloud Agents yourself.
Business use cases are similar to Hybrid deployment which we will talk about in the next module. Since you have both PaaS and Cloud Agents you can decide which integrations will be running in PaaS Agents and which will run in Cloud Agents. In addition, you can run some steps of integration in Cloud Agents using Remote Subprocesses. For example, if you have some resources, such as a database, secured by a firewall and you don't want to give PaaS Agents access to the database due to security, you can give your Cloud Agents access to that database and then run integrations or integration steps accessing that database using Cloud Agents.
The next article is Introduction to Hybrid Deployment