Hybrid deployment
If you are installing a Frends Agent on a physical machine, you are deploying a Ground Agent. If you have both PaaS Agents and Ground Agents in your Frends, you are having a Hybrid deployment. As with Multicloud deployment, you cannot have both PaaS and Ground Agents in the same Agent Group, but you can create separate Agent Groups for PaaS Agents and Ground Agents. A common case is to have one PaaS Agent Group and one Ground Agent Group for each Environment you have. For example, if you have three Environments (Development, Test, Production) then you would create six Agent Groups (CloudDev, OnPremDev, CloudTest, OnPremTest, CloudProd, OnPremProd). This enables you to develop and test your integrations in both PaaS and Ground Agents and host your integrations in the production Environment in both PaaS and Ground Agents.
The prerequisites for Hybrid deployment are that you need to have physical machines in which you can install the Agent Service and you need to have sufficient permissions on the machine to do the installation. In addition, you need to have admin permissions in Frends to create new Agents and Agent Groups in Frends.
Installing a Ground Agent is fairly simple with instructions found from Frends Documentation. In a nutshell, you need create a local account which will be used as a service account. If you have an AD in use, you can also use an account in that AD. Then you need to add service account credentials in the Frends Control Panel when you create a new Agent. Then you need to download the installation package and run it to install the Frends Agent Service on the machine. You should also store the installation package somewhere if you need to re-install the Agent Service.
As with Multicloud deployment, having a Hybrid deployment gives you more control over the integrations. For example, if you need some specific tools to be installed to the Agents which run your integrations, then it's easier to install them to Ground Agents than to PaaS Agents.
In addition to control, you also have more responsibility over your Agents, since you need to monitor your Ground Agents and make sure that those Agents keep running, especially if you have Ground Agents running Processes in production Environment. When your Frends is updated you also have to update Ground Agents yourself.
Business use cases for Hybrid deployment are similar to Multicloud deployment, since you can decide which integrations or integration steps will be running on Ground Agents. A major difference between Multicloud and Hybrid deployments is the location of the Agents. Depending on your cloud service provider you might not get your Agents deployed to countries which you would like them to be (for example to Finland), whereas Ground Agents can be wherever you want them to be since they are physical machines or virtual machines running on physical machines. Knowing exactly where the Agents are can be a critical security point when talking about confidential or sensitive data.
The next article is Introduction to Full PaaS Deployment