Agents
Agents are the part of Frends that execute the Processes. Agents are created in an Agent Group, and they work independently from other components. This means that even if the Frends Control Panel is in offline mode, for example, due to an update, the Agents can still execute Processes deployed to their Agent Group. Each Agent can only be assigned to a single Agent Group. You can find additional information on Agents from Frends Documentation. You can install multiple Cross platform Agents in the same machine because they will use SQLite as their database.
When installing the Agent, you need to make sure that the certifications are in order. Certifications need to be available in the local machine certification store for the HTTP and API Triggers to work. Frends PaaS Agents will get their certification automatically, but when dealing with Self Service Agents you need to provide a thumbprint of the certification. If the thumbprint is not provided, the Agent installer attempts to get the certification from the domain controller. If this fails, the Agent will create a self-signed certification. The expiration date of the certification will depend on the domain settings. Self-signed certifications will expire after 20 years.
Technical documentation can be found from Frends Documentation.
From a business viewpoint, you should always plan how many Agents you need per Agent Group by evaluating the critical business needs of the Processes deployed to that Agent Group. When talking about Processes which highly affect the business at hand it would be more important to have multiple Agents which will share the load in case of a malfunction. Also, it's good to take a look at how much of an impact the Process makes to the machines running the Processes. Frends Agents are only as strong as the machine behind them. If there's a need for a Process which will require a lot of memory, for example, the machine should be packed with the memory needed to run that Process and maybe a little bit more.
The next article is Introduction to Updating Frends and Agents.